This paper addresses the issue of impoliteness in the context of the verisimilitude
of film discourse. Taking as its departure point the notion of participation
framework encompassing two levels of communication underlying film
interaction and drawing on the recent developments in the relevant scholarship
on impoliteness, the present article puts forward a number of hypotheses
about how impoliteness, albeit extremely frequent and superfluous, is plausibly
rendered and does not strike viewers as being inconceivable given the way it is
realised on the characters’ level of communication. To this end, a few pragmatic
factors are discussed: impoliteness as a character trait, the speaker’s power,
sanctioning impoliteness within a community of practice, and the nature of
hearers’ reactions to impoliteness.
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