Meg Griffin's Theory Of Politeness

Impoliteness is a key term for this dissertation since one of the aspects I analyse when characterising Meg Griffin is the bullying that she suffers, a fact that can be strongly attached to impoliteness. But before talking about this concept, it is important to define what politeness means for Lakoff (1989), who argues that “politeness can be defined as a means of minimizing confrontation in discourse – both the possibility of confrontation occurring at all, and the possibility that a confrontation will be perceived as threatening” (p. 102). Three aspects have been identified by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). The first one is face, which includes aspects like reputation, prestige and self-esteem (Culpeper 2001). Two subtypes can be seen in …show more content…
Contrary to that, if the speaker only wants to attack face, it is a case of impoliteness (Culpeper 2001). In the case of TV series, “aggression has for thousands of years been a source of entertainment” (Culpeper 2001, p. 247). To put it another way, impoliteness is much more attractive than politeness, at least in the case of TV series. As argued by Gregori-Signes (2005), impoliteness is often used in TV series as the source of humour. Gregori-Signes (2005) analyses the series South Park and concludes that impoliteness can be used as a device to make the audience laugh and may be addressed to the audience and the character …show more content…
However, the ones who produce fewer declarative clauses have fewer opportunities to initiate exchanges: these are the marginal speakers, who imply a “lack of integration within the group’s exchanges” (Eggins & Slade 1997, p. 122). There are three main areas of interpersonal semantics. Broadly speaking, appraisal refers to the “attitudinal colouring of talk” (Eggins & Slade 1997, p. 124), which includes categories like “certainty, emotional response, social evaluation and intensity” (Eggins & Slade 1997, p. 124). The second one is that of involvement, defined as “how interpersonal worlds are shared by interactants through the use of vocatives, slang, anti-language and taboo words” (Eggins & Slade 1997, p. 124). Finally, we have humour, which consists of making fun of people. Based on the analyses from Martin (1994), Eggins and Slade (1997) identify four main categories of appraisal: appreciation, affect, judgement and