The metalinguistics of offence in (British) English
A corpus-based metapragmatic approach
Jonathan Culpeper | Lancaster University, UK
Michael Haugh | University of Queensland, Australia
Offence is a central concept in impoliteness, aggression and conflict research, yet has received only passing
mention in definitions of impoliteness and related concepts. Janicki (2017) argues that
impoliteness and language aggression scholars are needlessly worried about definitions. We use Janicki’s (2017) work as a springboard into a discussion of definitions of impolite or taboo language, airing
potential problems and suggesting that the study of metalanguage offers at least a partial solution. We report a study of the
metalanguage of offence in British English, and briefly examine whether there are any differences in Australian English,
using SketchEngine to interrogate data in the two-billion word Oxford English Corpus. In so doing, we tease out different uses of
the term offensive, and show that concepts such as offence are coloured by the specific linguistic and
cultural contexts in which they appear. We conclude that while corpus-based metalinguistic analyses cannot completely eliminate
the problem of definitional infinite regress, they do, however, offer an empirically grounded way of defining words that allows us
to move beyond the intuitions of individual researchers.
Keywords: impoliteness, offence, definition, metalanguage, metapragmatics, corpora, British English, Australian English
Published online: 29 May 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00035.cul
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00035.cul
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