Politeness and Impoliteness Strategies: An Analysis of Gender Differences in Geralyn l. Horton's Plays

This paper aims to analyse the speeches in six one-act plays by an American woman playwright, Geralyn L. Horton, to examine the gender differences in impolite acts. In the analysis of impoliteness, two classifications are taken as basis: types of strategies are classified according to the conventionalized impoliteness formulae and implicational impoliteness in Culpeper's latest book, Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence; responses to impoliteness are classified within the framework in Bousfield's Impoliteness in Interaction. The findings show that men use more impoliteness than women in their speech, and the frequency rates of the types of strategies deployed by men and women show differences.