A Socio-Pragmatic Study of Impolite Expressions in The American Action Movie ‘‘The Kill Team (2019)”

This study investigated impoliteness theory from a sociopragmatic perspective in the American action movie “The Kill Team (2019)”. The study aimed at; investigating the most frequent use of impoliteness strategies in American action movies, finding out how characters’ use of impoliteness is affected by social power and solidarity and investigating the functions of impoliteness strategies used by the characters in these movies. To achieve these objectives the researcher implemented a qualitative content analysis in analyzing every impolite situation extracted from the data of the movie, which includes impolite utterances employed by the characters of the chosen movie. Additionally, Culpeper’s (1996, 2011) models were adopted in identifying the types of impoliteness strategies and their functions, whereas Brown and Gilman’s (1960) theoretical framework of power and solidarity was used to investigate the extent to which power and solidarity influence characters’ use of impoliteness strategies. However, there have been a lot of studies conducted on impoliteness but most of these studies focused on how impoliteness strategies are employed pragmatically, without taking into account the social context in which this phenomenon occurs. Thus, the current study is conducted in the discipline of linguistics in order to give an additional contribution to the phenomenon of impoliteness, and fill a gap that according to the researcher’s knowledge impoliteness strategies have not yet been explored from a sociopragmatic perspective in American action movies, in sense it takes into account the extent to which the use of impoliteness is affected by social power and solidarity. The findings of this study are clarified as follows. First, four of the impoliteness strategies proposed by Culpeper (1996) were used by the characters of the movie. They were bald on record impoliteness strategy, positive impoliteness strategy, negative impoliteness strategy and sarcasm or mock politeness strategy. Positive impoliteness was the most frequently used strategy among the other, followed by negative impoliteness, which took the second position and then bald on record impoliteness and sarcasm or mock politeness. Meanwhile, withhold politeness was not used by any character in the movie. Regarding the two social variables ‘power and solidarity’, the results of the analysis revealed that powerful characters tend to use impoliteness strategies over the less powerful characters, as (10) strategies which formed a percentage of (76.9%) of the strategies were used by powerful characters. And that (3) strategies, i.e. (23.1%) percent of the total strategies, were used by characters who were equal in power in relation to the addressees. Finally, concerning the characters who were less powerful to the addressees, the analysis did not mention any use of impoliteness by them at all. In terms of solidarity, the analysis showed that only (5) occurrences which formed (38.5%) of the impoliteness strategies were performed by solidary interlocutors and that (8) occurrences which comprised (61.5%) percent of the impoliteness strategies were used by non-solidary interlocutors. Regarding the function of impoliteness, all the functions were used by the characters. The 'affective function' was the most frequently used function among the others, which was used (6) times i.e. (46.1%) of the total functions. Followed by the 'coercive function' which was used (5) times i.e. (38.5%) percent. Finally, the 'entertainment function' took the last place with (2) occurrences only which comprised (15.4%) percent of the total data.