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Chapter One Introduction

“Impoliteness” is a relatively new researching field. Compared with itscounterpart “politeness” , the researches of impoliteness are not adequate. However,it still develops in system rapidly especially in the West. Since when Culpeperdescribes impoliteness as a kind of “source of entertainment” (Culpeper, 2005), it islargely applied to analyzing literary works. William Shakespeare, the first greatestdramatist, has created a large amount of dramatic works. The Merry Wives of Windsorwhich is one of his famous comedies, has rarely been studied on its dialogue underthe framework of impoliteness. Through the analysis of the impoliteness phenomenain the dialogues of The Merry Wives of Windsor pragmastylistically, this thesis aimsto enlighten people on appreciating dramas as well as on practical language use froma new perspective.

1.1 Research Background
As two linguists Locher and Bousfield argued, impoliteness is neglected for along time and it is just like the cousin of politeness. Although both politeness andimpoliteness are of great importance in human’s social communication, impolitenesshas rarely received the same attention as politeness. In the field of politeness research,a large number of scholars contribute to the studies of politeness on a large scale.In that way, politeness is not only explored in the aspects of cognitive linguistics,pragmatics and sociolinguistics, but also in some cross-cultural fields. On the contrary,impoliteness has always been insufficiently studied. It is recognized that impolitenessindeed occurs frequently in our daily communication as the counterpart of politeness.Thus it deserves equal attention as politeness. And impoliteness has been studiedsystematically in Western countries since the 1990s because politeness theories canneither define impoliteness adequately nor interpret conflictive discourse precisely.Culpeper has done a deep research on impoliteness in diversified discourses.Bousfield (2008) puts forward an ameliorated impoliteness model which is “On-/Off-record impoliteness” model. Nevertheless, the majority of these studies are limitedwithin the micro utterance level. Not much attention has been paid to the impolitenessin discoursal level even in the turn-taking system. Furthermore, the previousimpoliteness-relavent studies are rarely conducted on William Shakespeare’s TheMerry Wives of Windsor.The Merry Wives of Windsor, one of William Shakespeare’s remarkable comedicdramas, has been criticized and analyzed in terms of language style, comparativeliterature, pure linguistic and so forth. But, there are inadequate researches on theimpoliteness phenomena in its characters’ conversations. Therefore, this paperattempts to explore the impoliteness phenomena in people’s dialogues in The MerryWives of Windsor based on Bousfield’s (2008) impoliteness model and tries to figureout the pragmastylistic functions of them.
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1.2 Research Objectives
Impoliteness is a relatively new theory in the field of pragmatics, it is thereforeworthy to be further studied. This thesis aims to conduct a pragmastylistic research onthe impoliteness phenomena in The Merry Wives of Windsor under the framework ofBousfield’s (2008) impoliteness model. Through this research, this thesis ties toexplore what kind of impoliteness strategies different characters choose to adopt intheir dialogues in The Merry Wives of Windsor. And more, th