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In:Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
Edited by Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 256] 2015
► pp. 157–182

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Impoliteness in the service of verisimilitude in film interaction

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Published online: 12 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.256.07dyn
This paper addresses the issue of impoliteness in the context of the verisimilitude of film discourse. Taking as its departure point the notion of participation framework encompassing two levels of communication underlying film interaction and drawing on the recent developments in the relevant scholarship on impoliteness, the present article puts forward a number of hypotheses about how impoliteness, albeit extremely frequent and superfluous, is plausibly rendered and does not strike viewers as being inconceivable given the way it is realised on the characters’ level of communication. To this end, a few pragmatic factors are discussed: impoliteness as a character trait, the speaker’s power, sanctioning impoliteness within a community of practice, and the nature of hearers’ reactions to impoliteness.
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