Publications

Publication details [#56281]

Waters, Sophia. 2012. “It's rude to VP”: The cultural semantics of rudeness. Journal of Pragmatics 44 (9) : 1051–1062.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Elsevier

Annotation

This article offers a detailed lexical semantic analysis of rude, the primary ethno-descriptor in the domain of “impoliteness” in Anglo society (Wierzbicka, 1997; cf. Fox, 2004), in the productive formula It's rude to VP, and in the fixed expression rude word. The semantic explications are framed in the simple Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) universal primes. The reasoning is bolstered by Australian English data, gathered from Google searches.