The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness

McKinnon, Sean; Prieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pr-2014-0009

The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness

Citation

McKinnon S, Prieto P. The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research. 2014 July;10(2):185-219. DOI: 10.1515/pr-2014-0009.

Abstract

Within the impoliteness literature, an important distinction has been made between genuine and mock (or non-genuine) impoliteness (Culpeper 1996, 2011; Bernal 2008, among others). Even though mock impoliteness has generally been analyzed within an impoliteness framework, recent proposals suggest that it is an essentially different pragmatic phenomenon that requires a continuous conversational evaluation (Haugh and Bousfield 2012). The present study had the goal of assessing the offline evaluation process of target genuine vs. mock impoliteness utterances, specifically the role the situational/ discourse contexts, as well as prosodic and gestural patterns, play in their interpretation. A total of 97 participants were either asked to rate the degree of impoliteness of target genuine and mock impoliteness utterances in isolation (Experiment 1), or to rate the same utterances preceded with a set of matched and mismatched situational/discourse contexts which favored either a genuine or a mock impoliteness interpretation (Experiment 2). The results of the two experiments show that (a) evaluations of intended mock impoliteness utterances generate more uncertainty in listeners than intended genuine impolite utterances; and (b) mock impoliteness evaluations are characterized by a more active use of gestural cues. These results provide evidence that mock impoliteness triggers a more complex evaluation procedure of a phenomenon that lies on the boundary between polite and impolite behavior.