Proposals are sought for a forthcoming edited volume devoted to impoliteness encoded by a variety of languages and expressed in language data retrieved from different media, such as television, radio (shows, interviews, live talks, etc.), Internet, TV, DVD and cinema films. The book is planned to be published with an international publisher. The total number of words of each paper proposal should not exceed 6000 words (including references).

The topics to be addressed involve, but are not limited to, different types of impoliteness and conflictive interactions, with such categories of description as:

· ignorance

· snub

· disagreement

· aggravation

· rudeness

· sarcasm and mock politeness

· insult

· offence

· verbal abuse

· aggression and/or harassment

found in the following contexts and research areas:

- impoliteness in computer-mediated discourse

- impoliteness in corpus-based studies

- impoliteness in audiovisual translation (subtitles, voice-over, dubbing)

- impoliteness in courtship setting

- impoliteness in educational setting

- impoliteness in institutional setting

- impoliteness in interpersonal setting

- impoliteness across dialects and genres

- impoliteness and power

- impoliteness and identity

- impoliteness and miscommunication

- impoliteness perception and interpretation

- intentional and un/intentional impoliteness

- impoliteness and humour

- impoliteness strategies

- impoliteness and rapport management

- post-Gricean and post-Brown and Levinson models of im/politeness

- linguistic and nonlinguistic impoliteness (including the role of prosody)

- a multimodal approach to impoliteness

- using taboo words, swearing and expletives

- a cognitive linguistic approach to impoliteness (e.g. the Blending Theory)

- Relevance Theory and impoliteness

- the language of politicians and journalists

- comparative - cross-linguistic and cross-cultural - and monolingual investigations of impoliteness.

Contrary to politeness theory, which has received attention for over forty years, with the now well known and classical publications by Erving Goffman (1967), Robin Lakoff (1973), Paul Grice (1975), Geoffrey Leech (1983) and Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson (1987), that have laid the foundations for the theory of harmonious face-to-face interaction viewed from pragmatic (Lakoff, Grice, Leech) and more sociolinguistic perspective (Goffman, Brown and Levinson), impoliteness has long been neglected and received attention only scarcely and sporadically. Notwithstanding the marginalization of the language of abuse, rudeness and verbal aggression in the past, a growing interest in impoliteness can be noticed more recently. The turn to aberration in verbal behaviour in pragmatic and sociopragmatic research is marked by milestone volumes authored or edited more recently by Derek Bousfield (2008), offering the first monographic account of impoliteness in face-to-face interaction, as well as an investigation of the relation between impoliteness and the language of power touched upon by Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (2008); Jonathan Culpeper (2011), who presents a thorough and detailed account of a whole variety of theoretical approaches to the linguistic notion of impoliteness; or Linguistic Politeness Research Group (2011; Watts 2003, Mills 2003), where a more radical - discursive (postmodern) - approach is proposed focusing on what is im/polite to the interactants themselves, and what – in their view – destabilizes harmonious communication, thus departing from a generic model of im/politeness seen as a theoretical model accounting for an ‘ideal’ participant and, consequently, placing the centre of gravity onto contextual and intentional aspects, and on an individual’s (layperson’s) understanding of what is impolite. The current trend in research on impoliteness oscillates between the two theoretical frameworks and occupies a mid-ground between the classical (objective) approaches, which are top-down constructs, and advocate a priori intentions which the hearer should just re-discover, and the discursive (subjective), bottom-up models (Bousfield and Culpeper 2008: 163), which are more inclined to treat intentions as post-facto phenomena. Some more specific accounts of behaviour in culture-bound milieu may also be found in several volumes currently available on the market, for example in a book dealing with different forms and contexts of im/politeness (in Swedish, Australian English, Thai, Cypriot Green, etc.) in a collection edited by Robin T. Lakoff and Sachico Ide (2005), a comparative English-Polish study of face offered by Ewa Bogdanowicz-Jakubowska (2010), im/politeness in the Spanish-speaking world edited by Maria Elena Placencia and Carmen Garcia-Fernandez (2007), and im/politeness in East Asia edited by Daniel Kadar and Sarah Mills (2010).

Drawing on the theoretical approaches and methodological paradigms proposed by the aforementioned linguists, the present volume wishes to contribute to the interesting issue of impoliteness in natural discourse by attesting its applicability to branches of knowledge beyond pure linguistics, namely to: political science, social science, media studies and audiovisual translation. While the theoretical and methodological foundations may be the starting point for interdisciplinary applications, we do not desist from discussions relying on methodological solutions favoured by political, media and social studies, or a combination of these, in search of transdisciplinary paradigms of impoliteness. Proposals of blending different methodological frameworks and qualitative methods with quantitative accounts are welcome. The contributions may reiterate, or rather re-consider and/or recast, impoliteness both from the point of view of a hearer (following Austin, 1990; Sperber and Wilson, 1987), or the speaker (Brown and Levinson, 1987), preferably, however, a combination of both is expected, to break away from and to remedy the incompleteness and biased views of the previous research paradigms that emerged largely in the wake of Brown and Levinson’s seminal work on face-work, in which case the focus would be placed squarely on the role of contextual information and the examination of interpersonal relations (this shares some common ground with the Conversation Analysis paradigm) - the model accommodated by most recent publications on impoliteness research. On this view, im/politeness emerges on-line as a result of negotiations, a ‘discursive struggle’, as the interaction proceeds, and the classification of what is and what is not im/polite is subject to the interactants’ quantification rather than to pre-defined linguistic typology of social norms of im/politeness superimposed on the actual language generated by two speakers (the epic/emic dychotomy, cf. Bousfield and Grainger, 2010). Further to this, the previously utterance or exchange based analysis of impoliteness has been replaced recently by impoliteness deployed in larger chunks of language, thus encompassing a wider context and longer stretches of speech, which is a more comprehensive approach to impoliteness analysis recommended by the editors of the present volume.

Please send an abstract of paper proposal of up to 350 words (including references) and a short (100 words) bionote by 30 of September to:

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