Inappropriate inspectors: Impoliteness and overpoliteness in Ian Rankin’s and Andrea Camilleri’s crime series

Abstract

This article explores evaluations of impoliteness and over-politeness in crime novel dialogues, in reference to the Pragmatics of Politeness and the Discursive Model (Locher and Watts, 2005;Watts, 2003Watts, , 2005Watts, , 2010. Metapragmatic comments, in which dialogue participants evaluate the ongoing communicative behaviour, offer important insights into the values and social norms that make up interaction. Literary dialogues, as opposed to naturally occurring conversations, have the advantage of offering numerous metapragmatic comments. This study examines police investigator dialogues that contain metapragmatic comments of impoliteness and over-politeness, concentrating on two maverick figures, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh-based John Rebus and Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian Salvo Montalbano, both of whose fractiousness in regards to procedural rules extends to social norms as well. The first part of the analysis looks at impoliteness, confirming the image of the maverick for whom impoliteness is fairly stereotypical. The determining factor is police rank: I find frequent institutional, that is, legitimized, and unchallenged impoliteness by those who are higher in rank. Secondly, I look at instances of over-politeness. The inspector, who readily uses insincere politeness in order to manipulate a suspect or a witness, is sceptical when evaluating politeness in others. By not commenting on impoliteness and through extensive negative evaluations of politeness, the narrator creates a protagonist who has become disenchanted with politeness and uses impoliteness as if it were normal, appropriate behaviour.

How to assess politeness in response to impoliteness: some examples from Latin comedy

“…4 See the list provided in Culpeper (1996Culpeper ( , 2016, and the extensive account, along with many related issues, in Culpeper (2011). 5 As it is the case also in contemporary literary dialogues: on metapragmatic comments revealing impoliteness and overpoliteness see Paternoster (2012). expressions are at play.…”

Creative linguistic impoliteness as aggression in Stanley Kubrick’sFull Metal Jacket

“…Utilising approaches from the study of impoliteness, rudeness and linguistic aggression in the analysis of characterisation and/or representations of interpersonal relations in fictional texts is not new. Culpeper (1996), Bousfield (2006;2014), Bousfield and McIntyre (2011), Brown (2013), Dynel (2012;, McIntyre and Bousfield (2017), Methias (2011), Paternoster (2012), Rudanko (2006), Simpson and Bousfield (2017) and many others have all demonstrated the value of using various models and approaches to impoliteness in the analysis and interpretation of character, characterisation, plot, and audience engagement. The benefits of these kinds of study to impoliteness theorising is that fictional texts arguably provide a laboratory-style set of conditions for researchers, analysts and theorists to test the limits of impoliteness approaches and models prior to turning those models to real-life interaction.…”

The Pragmatics of Persuasion in Fictional Communication

“…Pragmatics, for him, seeks to arrive at the invisible meaning, even if it is not actually written or uttered in discourse. Crucially, applying pragmatics, with all its different aspects, to the study of fictional discourse has been approached by many studies (e.g., Paternoster, 2012;Murphy, 2015;Hoffmann, 2017;Risdianto, Malihah, & Guritno, 2019, among others). These studies highlighted the extent to which the pragmatic level of analysis applied to fictional texts is significantly contributive to the interpretation of these texts.…”