Tonal-pragmatic characteristics of politeness and impoliteness in different speech genres

The paper deals with tonal and pragmatic characteristics of politeness and anti-politeness expressing benevolent or unfriendly, serious or non-serious attitude to the communicative partner in personal or status discourse. The paper is based on the assumption that there is a genre specificity of politeness expression. An important indicator of the ethno-cultural specificity of politeness is the priority of respectful attitude towards in-group and out-group members. Politeness is a graded communicative phenomenon. Such gradation makes it possible to construct a conventional scale of politeness. The opposite poles of this scale are accentuated politeness and demonstrative impoliteness, between which there are points of standard politeness and insignificant deviations from the norms of polite behavior. Some speech genres, particularly invitations, act as clichéd forms of polite behavior. Accentuated politeness is usually formal and can be an indicator of threat. Demonstrative impoliteness manifests itself in two main formats – rude and mocking behavior. In the postmodern era, tonal and pragmatic conceptualization of politeness can turn it into sarcastic and mocking behavior towards the addressee. Demonstrative jocular impoliteness can act as an indicator of in-group communication, usually in people of low social status.