A Genre Approach to the Study of Im-politeness

Abstract

This paper argues that genre notions, as understood by (Fairclough, 2003), can provide an overarching unit of analysis to accommodate both top-down and bottom-up analyses of impoliteness. These notions are here applied to the study impoliteness within an institutional genre: news interviews. Impoliteness is seen as the driving force behind a new genre, "news as confrontation", whose communicative goal is to reaffirm a view of the world. The multifunctionality of impoliteness in this context has been related to a mismatch between the introduction of impoliteness as a novel staple in the news as confrontation shows, and the unchanged social expectations of politeness as the default term in social interaction. At the level of the relationship between interviewee and interviewer, impoliteness manifests itself both at the lexico-grammatical level and interactionally. However, impoliteness is used to create rapport between the interviewer and the overhearing audience. Thus, incivility toward those guests who differ ideologically from the audience has to be assessed as rapport building, and seen as constitutive rather than disruptive of communal life. I provide two examples of the new genre by providing an in-depth analysis of two interviews by Bill O'Reilly for Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor the epitome of news as confrontation shows.

Face effects of verbal antagonism in online discussions

“…The properties of the medium and the structure of online discussion sites enable participants to engage in multi-party dialogue to an extent that is not physically possible in face-to-face communication; an online discussion can potentially involve hundreds of contributors. This, in turn, stimulates the formation of discourse communities (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010;Lorenzo-Dus and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2011;Perelmutter 2013;Upadh yay 2010). Besides offering a space for users to construct and project their own individual identities, online discussion boards thus also enable participants to cultivate and project a social identity, aligning themselves with the values of a given community and engaging in acts of social bonding with other community members.…”

Progressive and Conservative “Freedom” Through the Lens of FOX and MSNBC

“…In research conducted on outrage discourse, Sobieraj and Berry (2011) found that conservative media was much more likely than liberal media to use outrage tactics and elicit a "visceral response from the audience" (p. 19). Blitvich (2010) has also examined "news as confrontation" on shows such as the O'Reilly Factor where the host builds rapport with some guests while showing incivility to guests who differ from him ideologically, to reaffirm a worldview.…”

Contenidos / Contents

“…La cuestión de la direccionalidad seguida por los efectos de imagen se complica cuando, como sucede en muchas ocasiones, la interacción no es de tipo diádico (hablante/oyente), sino polilógico, integrando a todos los participantes (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010a). En este caso (como se vio en la interacción triádica de la ilustración), aunque la actividad comunicativa se dirija a una sola persona, las imágenes de los demás, incluida la del mismo hablante, también se ven afectadas en virtud de su coparticipación en la interacción y del continuo social que se crea, es decir, el efecto es multidireccional 6 .…”