engleski

The New Pandemic: Linguistic Incivility and Impoliteness

Different cultures have different norms and different values that “lie at the heart of impoliteness” (Culpeper 2011). The exact meaning of (im)politeness and (in)civility varies among cultures. For Culpeper (1996) impoliteness is a “a parasite of politeness”. The reasons why some contents and some signs become inexpressible differ from society to society. Regardless of how it is perceived, incivility is everywhere, moving ‘’along the continuum from less to more aversive, depending on the intensity and harshness of the words’’ (Masullo Chen 2017). Manifesting themselves in various ways, hate speech and discriminatory language have long ago overrun the boundaries of virtual reality to become ever-present in our daily communication. The analysis of some conversational implicatures in political and media discourse, that certainly pollute the space of public communication, shows that language is in a serious social crisis. In this era of cheap sensationalism and shallow communication we find more and more language elements that until recently would have been unthinkable in public channels. The real denotation of a curseword is a situation of conflict, of aggression (Archer 2008) towards the conversation partner, and using obscene words heightens the perlocutionary effects.Both the formal and the informal prohibitions arising from pragmatic norm-giving can concern any element of the communication context. The numerous constraints that pragmatic norms impose on public communication, arising partly from cultural and civilizational tradition (and partly from the ongoing need of those in dominant roles and statuses to preserve the communicative and social status quo), raise the philosophical, political, and also linguistic problem of human freedom in the public communication space. The focus of the paper is to discuss different impoliteness strategies in the public sphere. The analysed comments concern the current level of linguistic incivility that threats to become the next pandemic in today’s society.

incivility ; impoliteness ; pragmatic norms ; political and media discourse

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