A corpus-based analysis of (im)politeness metalanguage and speech acts: The case of insults in Shakespeare's plays

Abstract

In response to calls for first-order approaches to (im)politeness from scholars such as Watts et al. (2005 [1992]) and Eelen (2001), Oliver (2022) developed a corpus-based method for inductively locating (im)politeness metalinguistic items, wherein a total of 234 (im)politeness metalinguistic forms such as civil, kind, and villainous were located across 4023 instances in a corpus of Shakespeare's plays. Some scholars (e.g. Haugh, 2007:302; Haugh and Culpeper, 2018:216–217) have observed that the discursive perspective to (im)politeness precludes generalisation across encounters, and therefore quantitative corpus-based analysis. This study deviates from the discursive perspective by testing a corpus-based analysis of the relationship between (im)politeness metalanguage and speech acts, via insults, in the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus. While the results reveal methodological challenges with a corpus-based approach to identifying and comparing both phenomena, the approach nonetheless locates 11 conventionalised formulae for insulting encompassing 1447 instances. A sample of these insults are explored to examine their relationship with (im)politeness metalanguage, enriching an understanding of the use of (im)politeness metalanguage and insults in Shakespeare's plays generally. For example, it reveals that instances where (im)politeness metalanguage follows an impolite event tend to be when that event has a high impact on the events of the play.