Il linguaggio della scortesia. Meccanismi e strategie della “lingua più difficile del mondo”

An astonishing amount of research has been dedicated to Japanese honorifics and relational language, but few studies have been devoted to examining the language of offences and impoliteness. This study aims to investigate the mechanism and strategies of impoliteness in Japanese language by applying the theoretical approaches which were developed by Jonathan Culpeper following the tradition of studies on politeness formulated by Brown and Levinson. Aside from specific linguistic and cultural characteristics, this first preliminary investigation reveals that the Japanese language manifests many common features of the basic principles that characterise the strategies of impoliteness in different languages. By using real samples taken from YouTube video clips, as well as from various internet forums, it has been possible to produce a general description of the mechanisms of impolite Japanese language, not only in terms of lexical items, but also including pragmatic and phonetic elements that could contribute to the formation of impolite utterances.