Is offense really communicated and taken by participants in the context of The Weakest Link? This question is crucial, since I have already made clear that impoliteness is not inherent in particular linguistic strategies, and so my outline of “impoliteness” strategies in The Weakest Link above does not automatically mean that those strategies are to be judged impolite. Impoliteness is inferred from language in context.
As a preliminary to addressing this question, it is instructive to con-sider Watts’ (2003) distinction between “politic behaviour” and “polite-ness”. In doing so, we will see that Watts alludes to three different types of “impoliteness”. Politic behavior is “perceived to be appropriate to the social constraints of the ongoing interaction”, whereas politeness is
“perceived to go beyond what is expectable, i. e., salient behaviour”
(Watts 2003: 19). Some researchers see politeness as a matter of doing what is appropriate, but Watts is clearly right in allowing for the fact that people frequently do more than what is appropriate. The distinction Watts makes, in my view, is not absolute but a matter of degree. It captures the difference between highly routinized behaviors, such as greetings and leave-takings, and behaviors which are more elaborate, inviting, as Watts sees it, “potential classification” as politeness. This politeness, he argues, can be evaluated positively or negatively (e. g., it could include “potential irony, aggressiveness, abuse, etc.”) (Watts 2003:
161). Given Watts’ concerns with people’s actual usage and understand-ing of terms like “politeness”, it seems a little odd to talk of negatively evaluated politeness. This, the first type of “impoliteness”, seems to be what I would understand by my impoliteness superstrategy of “sar-casm”. Watts goes on to say that if politic behavior is “missing”, it
“tend[s] to lead to an evaluation of a participant’s behavior as ‘impolite’,
‘brash’, ‘inconsiderate’, ‘abrupt’, ‘rude’, etc.” (Watts 2003: 169; see also 131, 182). If the politic behavior is intentionally missed out, then this, the second type of “impoliteness”, would equate with my impoliteness superstrategy of “withhold politeness”. For cases where the absence of politic behavior is unintentional, I have reserved the term “rudeness”.
Watts also refers to a third kind of “impoliteness”: “sanctioned aggres-sive facework” (Watts 2003: 260). According to Watts (2003: 131⫺132):
certain social interaction types have interaction orders with lines [in Goffman’s facework sense] that sanction or neutralise face-threatening or face-damaging acts, e. g., interaction between family members or among close friends, competitive forms of interaction such as political
debate, rigidly hierarchised forms of interaction, e. g., in the military services.
This type of behavior is pertinent to my discussion of The Weakest Link:
is it the case that here we have one of those social interaction types that sanction or neutralize face-threat or damage?
In one sense Anne Robinson’s behavior is non-politic: as I have ar-gued, exploitative quiz shows run counter to the generic “polite”
norms⫺ the politic behavior ⫺ of standard shows. However, the issue is whether the exploitative quiz show The Weakest Link constitutes its own social interaction type which sanctions or neutralizes “impolite”
behaviors. As an example of an impoliteness sanctioning interaction type, Watts gives “military services”. In fact, in my earliest published work on impoliteness (1996), I also studied this interaction type. Regard-ing my analyses of army trainRegard-ing discourse, Mills (2002) argues that we need to consider “impoliteness” as part of a “Community of Practice”
(Wenger 1998). She writes:
I would argue that within that particular CofP, this [the instances of
“impoliteness” identified in my paper] is not classified as impolite, although it would be within almost any other community. The domi-nant group in the interaction, the officers, has managed to achieve a situation where the seeming excessive impoliteness (barked orders, ritualised insults) is considered to be the norm. Thus, if we simply analyse impoliteness in the apparently decontextualised way that Cul-peper does, we will be unable to grasp the way that politeness is only that which is defined by the CofP as such, and even then it is some-thing which may be contested by some community members. Thus, I would suggest that impoliteness only exists when it is classified as such by certain, usually dominant, community members, and/or when it leads to a breakdown in relations. (Mills 2002: 79)
It is not true to say that my discussion of the language was “decontextu-alised” in the way that, for example, Sperber and Wilson (1986) discuss decontextualized examples (part of my paper discussed the situation, the army training philosophy, and so on). More significantly, Mills’ under-standing of impoliteness seems to cut the target out of the equation.
Recall my definition of impoliteness, which clearly includes the hearer.
In my army training data, there is strong evidence that Private Alves perceived the Non-Commissioned Officers as intentionally communicat-ing face-attack. As I pointed out, she comments to a friend later in the
documentary that the “screaming” of the sergeants and the fact that they come “up close” can “get to a person” (Culpeper 1996: 363). Interest-ingly, in a footnote Mills (2002: 86) reports that a conference participant had stated that in his year’s army training “he found the level of impo-liteness personally threatening and offensive”, but Mills adds that
“nevertheless he recognized that it was appropriate to the context and did not in fact complain to the authorities about it”. What Watts fails to distinguish adequately and Mills seems to mix-up is the difference between sanctioning such behavior and neutralizing it. Much “impolite-ness” in army training is sanctioned, as Mills suggests by dominant mem-bers, but that does not mean to say that it is neutralized, i. e., that the target won’t take offense at perceived face-attack13.
Where Mills has a valid criticism is that context did not adequately figure in my theoretical thinking. Mills and others (e. g., S. Harris 2001, Mullany 2002) employ the notion of community of practice, but I prefer, for reasons that I do not have space to elaborate, a more centrally prag-matic notion, that of activity types (Levinson 1992; see also Thomas 1995: 187⫺194), not least of all because it interfaces well with my defini-tion of impoliteness. Levinson’s (1992) work on activity types was in-spired by Wittgenstein’s comments that understanding the meaning of utterances involves knowing the activity within which those utterances play a role. (Wittgenstein’s thinking partly related to the constitution of games, which is particularly apt, given that we are dealing with a game show here). According to Levinson, the notion of activity type:
refers to any to any culturally recognized activity, whether or not that activity is coextensive with a period of speech or indeed whether any talk takes place in it at all [. . .] In particular, I take the notion of an activity type to refer to a fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contributions. Paradigm examples would be teaching, a job interview, a jural interrogation, a football game, a task in a workshop, a dinner party, and so on. (1992: 69)
Levinson goes on to say that:
Because of the strict constraints on contributions to any particular activity, there are corresponding strong expectations about the func-tions that any utterances at a certain point in the proceedings can be fulfilling. (1992: 79)
And this has the important consequence that: “[activity types] help to determine how what one says will be ‘taken’ ⫺ that is, what kinds of
inferences will be made from what is said” (1992: 97). The (im)politeness value of an utterance is partly determined by the activity of which it is a part. A good example is ritualized banter (or “sounding”, “playing the dozens”) (see Labov 1972). In brief, this activity type takes place between friends (or members of an “in-group”) and involves the trading of for-mulaic insults, the suspension of the maxim of quality (typically, insults cannot be literally true), and the demonstration of cleverness (e. g., the use of poetic effects such as metrical rhythm and rhyme). Within this activity type, insults are not to be taken as impolite, but act socially to reinforce the group.
How might this work in relation to The Weakest Link? The Weakest Link is a game show, constituted by a certain structure and certain con-versational acts, as I have already elaborated in this paper. Moreover, it has formulaic elements (e. g., the catchphrases and one-liners discussed above) and verbal cleverness (e. g., the one-liners). Rather like ritualized banter, all this might suggest that the “impoliteness” is not being taken seriously. Moreover, the participant responsible for producing most of the potentially “impolite” utterances is a persona Anne Robinson cre-ated for the show⫺ it is a fiction. This means that one cannot straight-forwardly attribute face-attacking intentions to Anne Robinson. A simi-lar point is made by Montgomery (1999: 144) in his discussion of the chat show host Mrs Merton:
In order for a guest to take issue with a threat to face in the moment by moment conduct of the discourse, would require them to treat Mrs Merton seriously as if she were indeed a real person issuing a real FTA. Instead the rather elaborately contrived persona of Mrs Merton gives a mock or playful quality to the performance of the discourse.
All this means that theoretically it is difficult for a hearer to “take” what the host says as intentionally face-attacking, since the face-attack can be seen as a function of the game and not a personal goal. One might argue then that the “impoliteness” is not only sanctioned by the dominant group (e. g., the people who create, produce and host the show), but neutralized by the nature of the activity type.
However, in practice things are less straightforward. What concerns me is that people can and do still take offense in such situations. This is clear in military interactions, as illustrated above. It is also clear in The Weakest Link. After Danny’s pause-filler is mimicked, he produces a nervous laugh and looks down; after Chris’s job is met with sarcasm, he smiles and exhales; and, after Jay’s high-rising tone is mimicked, he pro-duces a prosodically disaffiliating “yes” and a smile. These actions sug-gest that they have taken Anne Robinson’s words as an attack.
More-over, these non-verbal features suggest emotional reactions such as em-barrassment. According to C. Harris (2001: 886), the most commonly reported non-verbal behaviors associated with embarrassment include
“blushing, smiling, avoiding eye contact, and self touching”. I view these emotions as symptoms of face-loss (see Goffman 1967: 8; Brown and Levinson 1987: 61). In one North American episode when the contestants were children, one participant was clearly tearful. There is also occasional evidence of embarrassment, humiliation and distress in the comments made to the camera by the contestants themselves after they have been voted off. But if the “impoliteness” is supposedly neutral-ized by the context of the activity type, where game-driven impoliteness is expected, why do the participants’ actions suggest that personal of-fense is taken? I would argue that targets of impoliteness tend not to pay sufficient attention to the context. The tendency for people to underesti-mate the impact of situational factors is a well-established finding in social psychology (e. g., Ross 1977; Tversky and Kahneman 1974; Gil-bert and Jones 1986). One reason for this is that behavior tends to be more salient than situational factors, as Heider (1958: 54) puts it:
[...] it tends to engulf the field rather than be confined to its proper position as a local stimulus whose interpretation requires the addi-tional data of the surrounding field⫺ the situation in social percep-tion.
Impoliteness strategies tend to be “rather marginal to human behaviour in normal circumstances” (Leech 1983: 105), and, consequently, they are even more salient than “politeness” strategies could be. It is difficult to see the wood for the trees: when under face-attack, it is difficult to see it in context, and so it is still possible for it to cause offense. To neutralize the impoliteness, the context must compete with the salience of the impo-lite signal. This is exactly what happens with ritualized banter. The for-mulaicity, suspension of the maxim of quality, poetic effects, and so on, compete with the impoliteness to neutralize it (and, on occasion, fail to do so).
As far as The Weakest Link is concerned, we are left with a situation where there can be different perspectives on the same event: some peo-ple ⫺ perhaps including the real Anne Robinson ⫺ may see it all as a game and the “impoliteness” as unreal; some others ⫺ perhaps the contestants in situ ⫺ may not pay adequate attention to the context and view the “impoliteness” as real. Such dual perspectives are fully accommodated within my definition of impoliteness, which explicitly al-lows any combination of speaker and hearer perspectives.
8. Conclusion
In my analyses of The Weakest Link I have focused on generic aspects and strategies that are part of the staple of the program. This is not to say that I have discussed all conceivable aspects. For example, the sine qua non of impoliteness is that you are able to perform it, and impolite-ness is likely to inflict more damage if defensive responses can be pre-vented. Anne Robinson exercises strong control over the conversational floor. Contestants who attempt to retaliate are met with utterances such as “I ask the questions here” or “It’s my show”. In the data of this paper, Danny appears to ignore Anne Robinson’s face-attack (he laughs it off), Shaun seems to accept it, whilst Jay gives prosodically hedged accept-ance. More robust or creative defenses occur in “celebrity specials”, as sometimes the contestants are seasoned public speakers and better able to cope with Anne Robinson’s attacks. Some remarks on counter-impo-liteness strategies are made in Culpeper et al. (2003), but this work could be developed.
In this paper, I have shown how a model of impoliteness is needed to describe the discourse of The Weakest Link. I have revised and comple-mented that model in the light of my data, proposing a new super-strategy of “off-record impoliteness” and a definition of mimicry, and adopted Spencer-Oatey’s (2002) face categories. In particular, my analy-ses have shown that the communicative resources for impoliteness go well beyond lexical and grammatical aspects. Prosodic aspects play a central role in communicating offense in The Weakest Link. One intri-guing issue is whether one could have understood the utterances as “im-polite” without the prosody. In other words, is prosody just a
“contextual aid” to meaning generation and understanding? This seems to be the prevalent view in the literature. Regarding sarcasm, Sperber and Wilson (1981) take this view of prosody, and Gibbs (1986) provides empirical support for it. Looking solely at my orthographic transcrip-tions, it seems likely that some of the impoliteness would still be inter-pretable. Just a few verbal clues may be enough in a context where impo-liteness is expected. For example, a sarcastic interpretation of a positive statement like “what an interesting person you turned out to be” would be the most relevant interpretation in this context (Sperber and Wilson 1986). However, it is also highly likely that potential instances of impo-liteness would be more ambiguous without prosody, and some would be missed. For example, the full impact of “you don’t” may be lost, as part of the sarcasm lies in the “polite” prosody of surprised interest; and precisely what is going on in the instances of acoustic mimicry may be lost.
Part of this paper addressed the issue of why impoliteness might be entertaining, and I referred to such factors as “voyeuristic pleasure”. In
my analyses, I showed how the “impoliteness” is done in a cleverly cre-ative ⫺ and hence entertaining ⫺ way. I also outlined the structural
“formula” for the show, arguing for the importance of “chat” in maxi-mizing the potential for face-damage, and showed the formulaic quality of the one-liners and catchphrases. These aspects⫺ “impoliteness”, ver-bal creativity, and formulaicity⫺ are amongst the elements that consti-tute the activity type of the show. But they are also amongst the elements that constitute ritualized banter, i. e., mock impoliteness. This raises the issue of whether “impoliteness” on The Weakest Link is genuine. If we also take on board the fact that Anne Robinson’s persona is a fiction, then genuine impoliteness should not occur. However, I have argued against this for this activity type and others (e. g., military training).
Importantly, evidence that the targets of the impoliteness take it as genu-ine is present in the form of their counter-strategies and non-verbal reac-tions. If the hearer “takes” a behavior as intentional face-attack, then that counts as impoliteness according to my definition. I square the ap-parent contradiction between the theoretical neutralization of impolite-ness and the actual taking of offense with reference to research in social psychology. Here, a well-established finding is that behaviors tend to
“engulf the field”. The high salience of impoliteness behaviors makes it very difficult for targets to neutralize them by factoring in context.
Notes
I am very grateful to the members of the Pragmatics and Stylistics Research Group at Lancaster University, the Linguistic Politeness Research Group and Nottingham University, who all gave me valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper in its guise as a talk. Needless to say, all remaining errors and infelicities are mine.
1. I am grateful to Derek Bousfield for originally bringing these distinctions made by Goffman to my attention.
2. In fact, though there is not space to elaborate the argument, Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) notion of ‘ostensive communication’ suits my purposes rather better, be-cause it is a broader notion than Grice’s non-natural meaning, and consequently better able to accommodate non-linguistic communication.
3. Goffman (1972) cited here is simply a different edition of Goffman (1967). The page numbers are the same.
4. I am grateful to Anne Wichmann for drawing my attention to this issue.
5. This is part of a longer extract analyzed in Culpeper (1998).
6. My translation of:
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem;
non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas, sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est.
7. Ronald Carter’s recent landmark book Language and Creativity: The Art of Com-mon Talk (2004) is based on the CANCODE corpus. This corpus contains almost no confrontational interactions (Carter: pers. com.). Not surprisingly, therefore,
Carter’s book does not attend to the kind of impolite usages of verbal creativity I describe in this paper.
8. I searched various corpora and the web (via WebCorp at http://www.webcorp.
org.uk/) to establish the fact that these all occur with a certain regularity in the language. However, some expressions are restricted to particular registers. ‘Waste of rations’, for example, seems to be largely restricted to army jokes.
9. The points made here also apply to the Pop Idol example, which is characterized by cleverness.
10. For a useful brief introduction to prosodic resources and their ‘attitudinal’ func-tions, as well as insights into prosody and impoliteness, see Anne Wichmann’s work in Culpeper et al. (2003: 1568⫺1575). More generally, Knowles (1987:
10. For a useful brief introduction to prosodic resources and their ‘attitudinal’ func-tions, as well as insights into prosody and impoliteness, see Anne Wichmann’s work in Culpeper et al. (2003: 1568⫺1575). More generally, Knowles (1987: