Rudeness differs: to the 20th anniversary of linguistic impoliteness research

Linguistics as well as any other science has been developing systematically, bringing absolutely new objects into the sphere of its interests. The contemporary linguistics studies, among other subjects, the phenomena of everyday speech actions of communicants which in the recent past were not considered to be the object of linguistic research. Linguistics has been recently paying special attention to a number of socio-pragmatic categories which emphasize the significance of language as the basic instrument of communication. Both politeness and impoliteness as its logical antipode seem to be among the most dynamically developing objects of research by contemporary pragmaticians and sociolinguistists. Taking into consideration the publications of the last decade, the article systematizes the achievements of foreign linguists in impoliteness research. Firstly, the article briefly surveys the early, so called “post-Brown- Levinsonian” linguistic works on impoliteness. Secondly, the article surveys a number of contemporary discourse theories of impoliteness, including the so-called “post-modern” and sociological (interactional) approaches to the study of politeness / impoliteness. The author pays special attention to the point of main disagreements between impoliteness theorists, in particular, to the point of taking / not taking into account intentions of producers of impolite / rude utterances and the point of terminological duality: what type of speech actions should be called ruden and what type of speech actions should be called impolite.