International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online) Vol. 5 No. 2; March 2016 Australian International Academic Centre, Australia Impoliteness in Literary Discourse: A Pragmatic Study Hiba Nassrullah Mohammed College of Education for Women, Baghdad University E-mail: ladywaterlily971@yahoo.com Nawal Fadhil Abbas (Corresponding author) College of Education for Women, Baghdad University E-mail: nawal_fa71@yahoo.com Received: 13-09-2015 Accepted: 07-12-2015 Advance Access Published: December 2015 Published: 01-03-2016 doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.2p.76 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.2p.76 Abstract Brown and Levinson's model of politeness (1987) paved the way for linguists to explore the phenomenon of impoliteness. Meanwhile, Brown and Levinson dealt with politeness as a knotty framework applied to soften face threatening acts, other linguists including, Culpeper, Bousfield and Eelen, headed for the opposite direction of politeness. In other words, they studied the communicative situations where the speaker's purpose is to damage a hearer's face rather than softening face threatening acts. This research paper is intended to examine the opposite direction of politeness ‘impoliteness phenomenon’ in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913). Furthermore, it highlights the variation of impoliteness strategies used by characters. It is worth mentioning that the present paper is qualitative as it is dedicated to describe a certain pragmatic phenomenon, i.e., impoliteness, depending on Culpeper’s (2005) model of impoliteness, as a theoretical framework, to identify impoliteness in an advisedly chosen literary text. Consequently it is hoped to provide a deeper understanding of the fictional characters by applying a pragmatic analysis through which the characters' conversation will be examined thoroughly. Keywords: Pragmatics, politeness, impoliteness, Pygmalion 1. Introduction Fraser and Nolen (1981, p.96) suggest that politeness is “the result of a conversational contract entered into by the participants in an effort to maintain socio-communicative verbal interactional-free.” According to them, politeness is a bunch of constraints on verbal behavior and the nature of these constraints depends on the social setting of interaction, the relationship of participants, and the language used (Watts, Ide, & Ehlich, 2005, p. 46). While Leech (1983) defines politeness as a set of behavioral forms which are performed to create a kind of maintenance or harmony, and the performance of these behavioral forms depends on a participants' ability to engage themselves in a harmonic atmosphere of verbal interaction in a certain socio-communicative situation (Ibid.). Both Culpeper and Eelen noticed that all the theorists of politeness refer to impoliteness superficially while, in practice, their deep focus was on politeness and thus, their comments on the notion of impoliteness were insufficient and to some extent prejudiced. In a nutshell, the reason behind the recent interest in impoliteness was the inability of politeness approaches to explain amply the confrontational interaction in impolite discourses (Bousfield, 2008, p. 71). Watts (in Lambrou and Stockwell, 2007, p. 211) states that “… (im)politeness is a term that is struggled over at present, has been struggled over in the past and will, in all probability, continue to be struggled over in the future.” Watts' definition implies the continuity of disagreement over the notion of impoliteness among scholars. One of the main challenges that the researchers face when conducting the present paper is choosing a suitable literary work to examine Culpeper’s model. The application of such a formidable pragmatic model, which needs a rich text containing a large amount of exchanges, requires them to think of a play rather than a novel or a short story. Among all other plays, they pick Pygmalion, by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, as it has all the qualifications that they seek for in a literary text including: 1. The astounding astuteness of the playwright who is described by Burt as “ the greatest English dramatist since Shakespear” ( Burt, 2009, p. 164) 2. The fertile text of the play which is full of various impoliteness examples and techniques. 3. Language, in this play, represents a fundamental theme; a transition point in the heroine’s character, Eliza Doolittle; and the hero’s obsession, Henry Higgins who is specialist in Phonetics. 2. An Overview of Pragmatics Generally speaking, pragmatics is the study of language in use. It is the study of meaning not as generated by the linguistic system but as conveyed and manipulated by participants in a communicative situation. The modern concept of pragmatics was first introduced by the philosopher, Charles Morris, in 1938. He gave the following well-known Flourishing Creativity & Literacy