Impoliteness and mock-impoliteness

In this article I offer an empirical analysis of impoliteness and mock-impoliteness in colloquial Russian conversation by examining the ways in which interlocutors produce and display an orientation to impolite and mock-impolite utterances. The corpus consists of recorded video from naturally occurring talk-in-interaction from the Russian reality television show Dom Dva ‘House Two’. I argue that both, first-order, participant-constructed and second-order, analyst-constructed approaches to politeness and impoliteness studies can, and should, be used to inform one another. I use both approaches in order to analyze the specific ways mock-impolite and impolite turns are designed linguistically (through lexical items, turn structure and prosody) and paralinguistically (through laughter, pauses and body language). Further, I examine how these turns are discursively co-constructed by the interlocutors.