This volume of articles comprises papers from the 25th annual conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), which was held at the University of Huddersfield, England, in July 2005. The theme of the conference was 'Stylistics and Social Cognition', and as usual at a PALA conference, this theme was interpreted very widely by the participants, as the reader of this book will no doubt conclude. At the heart of this volume, there is something of a reaction against the cognitive developments in stylistics, which might be seen as being in danger of privileging the individual...

Drawing on a wide range of empirical data, the volume presents a thorough discussion of impoliteness and power in language. It addresses the enormous imbalance that exists between academic interest in politeness phenomena when compared to impoliteness phenomena, and it offers inspiration for research on impoliteness, conflict and aggression in many different academic fields of enquiry, both within linguistics and beyond.

This study concerns the nature of impoliteness in face-to-face spoken interaction. For more than three decades many pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies of interaction have considered politeness to be one central explanatory concept governing and underpinning face-to-face interaction. Politeness' "evil twin" impoliteness has been largely neglected until only very recently. This book, the first of its kind on the subject, considers the role that impoliteness has to play by drawing extracts from a range of discourse types (car parking disputes, army and police training, police-public...