Teasing has often been linked with studies of face, with many analysts claiming that it can be interpreted as face-threatening and/or face-supportive depending on the context. Since teasing encompasses such a diverse and heterogeneous range of actions in interaction, however, the analysis of teasing in this paper is restricted to a particular type of teasing, namely, jocular mockery. After exploring how jocular mockery is interactionally achieved as an action, the ways in which participants align or disalign their responses to previous actions through jocular mockery, thereby indexing affiliative or disaffiliative stances with other participants is discussed. Building on this initial analysis, it is proposed that an approach to pragmatics informed by the results and methods of conversation analysis can usefully ground an exploration of the ways in which jocular mockery influences the participants" interpretings of their evolving relationships, here glossed as face consistent with its conceptualization in Arundale"s (1999, 2006, this volume) Face Constituting Theory. It is argued that an approach to jocular mockery which explicates its impact on the evolving relationship between the interactants gives a richer account than that concerned only with the personal identity, public image or the wants of individuals, as face has traditionally been understood.
The discursive approach to politeness represents one of the most coherent challenges to the dominance of Brown and Levinson's politeness theory to date, and indeed to the continuing viability of the field of politeness research itself. However, while the discursive approach advocates the displacement of politeness as the focus of research, upon closer examination of the epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying this approach, a number of inconsistencies arise. In particular, the issue of how researchers can identify instances of (im)politeness without imposing the analysts' understandings comes to the fore. In this paper it is suggested that a theory of (im)politeness needs to examine more carefully how (im-) politeness is interactionally achieved through the evaluations of self and other (or their respective groups) that emerge in the sequential unfolding of interaction. This entails the analyst looking for evidence in the interaction that such (im)politeness evaluations have been made by the participants, either through explicit comments made by participants in the course of the interaction (less commonly), or through the reciprocation of concern evident in the adjacent placement of expressions of concern relevant to the norms invoked in that particular interaction (more commonly). In this way, the development of a theory of (im)politeness within a broader theory of facework or interpersonal communication can remain a focal point for the field of politeness research.
Mock impoliteness in English has generally been approached in the context of theorising politeness or impoliteness. In this paper we undertake a cross-cultural, intra-English language sociopragmatic exploration of the way in which behaviour such as 'banter' is manifested, co-constructed and manipulated for social bonding purposes in both Australian and British varieties of English. The analysis focuses on explicating two particular interactional practices of banter, jocular mockery and jocular abuse, in male-only interpersonal interactions in (North West) Britain and Australia, and comparing the topics of such mockery and abuse. It is argued that jocular mockery and jocular abuse very often occasion evaluations of mock impoliteness, that is evaluations of potentially impolite behaviour as non-impolite, rather than politeness or impoliteness per se, and that these evaluations arise from a shared ethos that places value on "not taking yourself too seriously". It is also suggested such evaluations are cumulative and differentially distributed in multi-party interactions. For these reasons we suggest the mock impoliteness constitutes an social evaluation in its right rather than constituting subsidiary form of either politeness or impoliteness.
Im/politeness is often conceptualised as the hearer's evaluation of a speaker's behaviour in discursive politeness research, representing the broader concern with the participant's perspective in current im/politeness research. Yet despite the importance afforded evaluations in such approaches, the notion of evaluation itself has remained, with just a few notable exceptions, remarkably under-theorised in pragmatics. In this paper it is proposed, building on work from discursive psychology and ethnomethodology, that im/politeness evaluations are intimately inter-related with the interactional achievement of social actions and pragmatic meanings vis-à-vis the moral order, and thus evaluations of im/politeness can be ultimately understood as a form of social practice. However, it is argued that an analysis of im/politeness as social practice necessitates a move away from a simplistic speaker-hearer model of interaction to a consideration of the broader participation framework within which they arise, and the positioning of the analysts vis-à-vis that participation order. A key finding from close analysis of evaluations of im/politeness in interaction relative to these participation footings is that they are distributed, variable and cumulative in nature.
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