Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specific behaviours occurring in specific contexts. It is sustained by expectations, desires and/or beliefs about social organisation, including, in particular, how one person's or a group's identities are mediated by others in interaction. Situated behaviours are viewed negatively – considered ‘impolite’ – when they conflict with how one expects them to be, how one wants them to be and/or how one thinks they ought to be. Such behaviours always have or are presumed to have emotional consequences for at least one participant, that is, they cause or are presumed to cause offence. The degree of offence, and also the quality of offence (the specific negatively valenced emotion experienced), depends in particular on the following factors (some of which overlap):

• which (and the extent to which) expectations, desires and/or beliefs infringed are cognitively active;

• the emotional sensitivity of the expectations, desires and/or beliefs infringed;

• the degree of offence conventionally associated with any linguistic formula used;

• the amount and kind of intensifying linguistic work undertaken (the choice of intense lexis, the addition of taboo words or intensifiers, prosodic reinforcement, etc.);

• the amount of inferential work required to understand the behaviour in context;

• the way in which and the extent to which the behaviour matches or mismatches: (1) the other parts of the multimodal behaviour, or (2) the context;