The politics of being insulted
- 2 October 2015
- journal article
- Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company in Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
- Vol. 3 (1), 107-127
- https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.3.1.05kam
Abstract
Scholars of politeness admit that being insulted may be the result of the hearer’s assumptions about the other’s behavior and may not necessarily relate to the actual words or intentions of the speaker. Thus, it is surprising to find only a few accounts of how people are doing “being insulted” or of how, in public discourse, responses to insults are strategically employed for various ends. In this paper, I analyze the meta-pragmatics of “hurt feelings” in order to understand how speakers do things with emotions and the role of hurt feelings in political democratic discourse. By examining instances in which public figures have stated their feelings of insult in Israeli public discourse (1997–2012), I show both how hurt feelings are strategically employed to protest against politically unacceptable acts, and how public actors sometimes explicitly refuse to be insulted, shifting the meaning of what is perceived as an insult by side-participants into a compliment. I conclude by discussing the consequences of manifesting hurt feelings in political discourse.Keywords
This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
- Strategic uses of parliamentary forms of address: The case of the U.K. Parliament and the Swedish RiksdagJournal of Pragmatics, 2010
- “You're barking mad, I'm out”: Impoliteness and broadcast talkJournal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 2009
- The pragmatics of forgiveness: judgments of apologies in the Israeli political arenaDiscourse & Society, 2008
- Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplacesJournal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, 2008
- Questioning Presidents: Journalistic Deference and Adversarialness in the Press Conferences of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower and ReaganJournal of Communication, 2002
- The power of feelingEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002
- FTAs and Erskine May: Conflicting needs?—Politeness in question timeJournal of Pragmatics, 2001
- Why conversation is not the soul of democracyCritical Studies in Mass Communication, 1997
- The speech act of apology in political lifeJournal of Pragmatics, 1990
- Conditions of Successful Degradation CeremoniesAmerican Journal of Sociology, 1956