A Pragmatic Analysis of Impoliteness in Reply Articles as an Instance of Academic Conflict

Abstract

The current study aimed to investigate the realization of impoliteness in reply articles published in academic journals in the field of applied linguistics as an instance of academic conflict. Drawing on the theoretical model of impoliteness (Bousfield, 2008a), on-record and off-record impolite behaviors were coded in a corpus of 49 reply articles published in academic journals. The results of the analysis including the frequency counts as well as normalized frequency scores demonstrated the prevalence of on-record impoliteness, i.e. the authors of the reply articles revealed a strong preference for using on-record impolite behaviors while responding to comments posed by other scholars in the field on their previously published works. The findings of the current study seem to contribute to the academic community by expanding the currently available literature on (im)politeness. Moreover, the findings would raise the consciousness of the academic courses instructors, novice and professional members of the applied linguistics discourse community considering the potential (im)politeness implications of their contributions to the discourse community in order to choose pragmatically appropriate alternatives (Ishiara, 2006).