Introduction

There has been surprisingly little analysis of impoliteness itself, in research on politeness in general; perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that much of the research is dependent on a view of conversation which ‘emphasises the harmonious aspect of social relations, because of an emphasis on conversational contracts and the implicit establishment of balance between interlocutors’ (Spencer-Oatey 2000: 3). However, there are occasions when people attack rather than support their interlocutors, and sometimes those attacks are considered by others to be impolite and sometimes they are not. Keinpointner argues that non-co-operative behaviour should be seen as less exceptional than most politeness theorists see it (Keinpointner, 1997). He suggests that it is idealistic to assume that everyone tries to co-operate for most of the time. However, Eelen argues that the model of politeness drawn on by researchers in this field is one which implicitly or explicitly focuses only on politeness and sees impoliteness as a deviation; this causes theoretical difficulties since ‘the concepts involved can never explain impoliteness in the same way or to the same extent as they explain politeness. So the polite bias is not just a matter of differential attention, it goes far deeper than that: it is a conceptual, theoretical structural matter. It is not so much quantitative, but rather a qualitative problem’ (Eelen, 2001: 104). Furthermore, the polarisation of politeness and impoliteness might lead us to assume that, for interlocutors, behaviour falls into either one or the other category.