What’s in a word? Reflections about impoliteness and future directions

Abstract

This short piece, prompted by the chapters in this volume, considers the question whether impoliteness is more a matter of the form of particular expres-sions (what the expression looks like) or of the meaning that they convey (what the expression means). A new distinction between ‘conventions of form’ and ‘conventions of meaning’ is proposed to capture these two possibilities, which can be accounted for under two different understandings of conventionalization, as lexicalization (verbatim repetition of a form across contexts) or as constructionalization (possibility of replacement by synonymous expressions leading to abstraction away from specific lexical items). Both options have been entertained in the liter-ature and the chapters in this volume offer the tools to approach this fascinating question at the heart of im/politeness research with renewed theoretical and methodological rigor.