A brief historical survey 1
Impoliteness research has finally begun to expand with researchers, like those contributing to this Special Edition, drawing from an eclectic range of research paradigms. One of the most enduring language-oriented lines of research feeding into the study of "impoliteness" must be the study Οͺ often philological in flavour Οͺ of swearing. The classic is Montagu's Anatomy of Swearing (1968) and the most substantial work to date is Hughes's mighty An Encyclopaedia of Swearing (2006). However, perspectives on swearing have recently broadened to include both a sociolinguistic perspective (see McEnery 2005), and one that combines both social and cognitive issues (see Jay 2000). Nevertheless, whilst, unlike earlier studies, these approaches do consider the use of swearing in context, it is obvious that there is more to being impolite than just swearing. Perhaps the first comprehensive and theoretically-grounded paper on the topic is Lachenicht's (1980) "Aggravating language: A study of abusive and insulting language". Although there are problems with both the theory and methodology (see Culpeper et al. 2003, it is weighty and innovative. Surprisingly, far from being a catalyst for further research, it almost disappeared without trace.
In the interim, research into "politeness" gathered momentum. The classic politeness theories, such as Lakoff (1973), Brown and Levinson (1987 [1978]) and Leech (1983), focused on harmonious interactions, and thus, quite understandably, ignored impoliteness. Moreover, as elaborated by Eelen (2001: 98Οͺ100), they are generally not well equipped, conceptually or descriptively, to account for impoliteness. In particular, they tend to give the impression that impoliteness is either some kind of pragmatic failure, a consequence of not doing something, or merely anomalous behaviour, not worthy of consideration. The revival of discussions of impoliteness, within pragmatics at least, seems to have come