Mock impoliteness in Spanish: evidence from the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus

Abstract

Mock impoliteness is defined as a specific form of politeness, one in which participants in a conversation perceive acts such as jocular mockery, insults and banter as non-impolite (Haugh, Michael & Derek Bousfield. 2012. Mock impoliteness in interactions amongst Australian and British speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 44. 1099–1114). Following the model of the third wave of politeness and Sinkeviciute, Valeria (2019. Conversational humour and (im) politeness: A pragmatic analysis of social interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins), the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon in colloquial conversation. Second, it illustrates this in a language other than English, specifically Peninsular Spanish, using data on informal interactions. The database is composed of 148 humorous sequences from the VALESCO.HUMOR corpus (http://www.observahumor.com/corpus_valesco). 25.67 % of these were identified and analyzed as mock impoliteness, using a tentative procedure for exploring humor negotiation in mock impoliteness through the assessment of a number of elements. These included the issue of which linguistic and paralinguistic elements are used by participants, and the interpretation of the initial aggressive style focused on the target, be it the recipient in a conversation or an absent third party (Béal, Christine & Kerry Mullan. 2017. The pragmatics of conversational humour in social visits: French and Australian English. Language & Communication 55. 24–40). Finally, we considered the question of whether or not the humor introduced by mock impoliteness was sustained throughout a sequence. When a target is oriented to a recipient in the exchange, the data shows a trend towards strengthening social bonds with the group and sustaining humor across the sequence. In other cases, however, the recipient might feel offended or insulted and hence respond in a serious mode, the main effect of the humor then being to create social distance within the participant group. When the target is oriented to an absent third party, humor tends to serve to reinforce cohesiveness between the group at the expense of others.