An Empirical Study of Impolite Evaluation in Modern Chinese

Culpeper (1996) proposed the theory and strategy of impolite, and his research laid the foundation for the study of impolite language, which led to the gradual independence of impolite language research from the study of polite language.<br/> Looking back at the research achievements of Chinese scholars in the field of impolite language, this paper finds that in the past two decades, scholars have achieved various and fruitful research results in the field of impolite language. The research perspectives include: impolite language theory, impolite strategy, impolite language function in different communication situations, and comparison with other languages.<br/> This paper considers it necessary to conduct research on impolite evaluation. Culpeper (2011) defines impolite language as “a comprehensive evaluation of the understanding of impolite language, combining corpus, context, and communication environment.” When language users appear as observers of language communication, their evaluation of impolite language can reflect people’s perception of impolite language to some extent, and can also help us understand the nature of impolite language more fully.<br/> In particular, this paper aims to investigate how the impolite language phenomenon occurs in Chinese context by combining questionnaires and interviews from the perspective of user evaluation, taking the impolite language strategy as the core of Culpeper’s theory. The evaluation research of this paper includes two aspects, one is the evaluation of the nature of impolite language by Chinese speakers, that is, whether the communication language is impolite language. The second is to evaluate the degree of linguistic phenomena that Chinese users generally believe to be impolite, that is, to evaluate the degree of impolite.<br/> Through questionnaires, interviews, statistics and analysis, it is found that the evaluation of Chinese speakers’ language communication behavior in the Chinese context is inconsistent with Culpeper’s impolite language strategy. This paper also finds that Chinese speakers evaluate the degree of impolite language behavior under the impolite language strategy and presents different levels of impolite language behavior. The degree of impoliteness is mainly influenced by factors such as personal perception, word-making, moral convention and stereotype.<br/> To sum up, this paper hopes to provide another research perspective for the study of impolite language: from the perspective of language user evaluation. At the same time, this study draws a graph of the degree of impolite, which is expected to provide a quantitative reference value for people to understand the degree of impolite.