Dobs, Abby & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar (2013). Impoliteness in polylogal interaction: Accounting for face-threat witness’s responses. Journal of Pragmatics 53: 112-130. Impoliteness in polylogal interaction: Accounting for face-threat witness’s responses Abby Dobs Pilar G. Blitvich Abstract Though, in recent years, impoliteness research has embraced a view of impoliteness as dynamically co-constructed in interaction, the role of impoliteness in polylogal discourse is still in need of further examination. Drawing from a corpus of naturally occurring classroom discourse, this paper uses a genre approach (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010) to examine the role of face-threat witnesses in small-group discussion practices among adolescents. Our research shows that face-threat witnesses respond in complex and dynamic ways that are integral to the co-construction of impoliteness, and that would have been missed entirely if the focus of our analysis had been purely dyadic. In view of our finding, we propose a refinement of extant models of response options (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann, 2003; Bousfield 2007, 2008) that incorporates the response options available to face-threat witnesses, thus moving beyond the dyad. Accounting for the multifunctionality of impoliteness in polylogal interaction allows for an understanding of impoliteness as constitutive, not just disruptive, of social life. With further application, our proposed refinement of extant models can help expand research that examines manifestations of impoliteness in a wide range of (non)institutional, polylogal discourse. Key Words: impoliteness, polylogal discourse, classroom interaction, small-group discussion, adolescent 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to further current understanding of impoliteness by analyzing how witnesses to the face-threat (Goffman, 1967: 27, 125) or impoliteness act respond to impoliteness and to propose a revision to extant models (Culpeper et al., 2003; Bousfield, 2007). In-depth research on impoliteness is relatively recent (Culpeper, 1996; 2011; Bousfield 2008), and it has inherited, as it were, some of the methodological traits of traditional politeness scholarship, among those a focus on dyadic interaction (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010; 2013; Dynel, 2012; Lorenzo et al., 2011; Watanabe, 2011). However, many interactions are likely to be polylogal (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2004) – i.e. they involve three or more participants. Polylogal interactions provide interesting sites for research, as was pointed out by Goffman (1981: 133): “The relation(s) between speaker, addressed recipients and unaddressed recipient(s) are complicated, significant, and not much explored”. These relations remain, to this day, mostly unexplored. In what pertains impoliteness, an analysis of face-threat witnesses’ responses to impoliteness helps us better understand the dynamic ways in which impoliteness meanings are co-constructed in interaction and impoliteness interpretations arise. This is what we set out to do here by applying a genre approach to im/politeness (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010; 2013) - which understands genres not as forms but as frames for social action - to the analysis of face- threat witnesses’ responses as they engaged in one genre practice of classroom discourse, namely