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Article published In:
Thematic issue: New perspectives on conflict
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:2] 2021
► pp. 185–214

The metalinguistics of offence in (British) English

A corpus-based metapragmatic approach

ORCID logo | Lancaster University, UK
ORCID logo | University of Queensland, Australia

Offence is a central concept in impoliteness, aggression and conflict research, yet has received only passing mention in definitions of impoliteness and related concepts. Janicki (2017) argues that impoliteness and language aggression scholars are needlessly worried about definitions. We use Janicki’s (2017) work as a springboard into a discussion of definitions of impolite or taboo language, airing potential problems and suggesting that the study of metalanguage offers at least a partial solution. We report a study of the metalanguage of offence in British English, and briefly examine whether there are any differences in Australian English, using SketchEngine to interrogate data in the two-billion word Oxford English Corpus. In so doing, we tease out different uses of the term offensive, and show that concepts such as offence are coloured by the specific linguistic and cultural contexts in which they appear. We conclude that while corpus-based metalinguistic analyses cannot completely eliminate the problem of definitional infinite regress, they do, however, offer an empirically grounded way of defining words that allows us to move beyond the intuitions of individual researchers.

Keywords: impoliteness, offence, definition, metalanguage, metapragmatics, corpora, British English, Australian English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Definitions in research on aggression and conflict
    • 2.1Janicki’s position
    • 2.2Drawing out issues for aggression and impoliteness scholars
  • 3.Metapragmatics and metalanguage
  • 4.A study of offence and its meaning
    • 4.1Some observations on the notion of offence in research on linguistic impoliteness and taboo language
    • 4.2The metalinguistics of offence: A corpus-based study
      • 4.2.1Our approach and focal point
      • 4.2.2Method
      • 4.2.3 Offensive in British English
      • 4.2.4Are there differences between British and Australian English conceptions of offence, and if so, what are they?
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00035.cul
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