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Chapter OneIntroduction

This chapter is a brief introduction to this research, which discusses the researchbackground, objectives, significance and the organization of the whole thesis.

1.1 Research Background
Politeness and impoliteness are both very important issues in pragmatic study. Thestudy on politeness has aroused great concerns of scholars throughout the world sincethe ancient times. And so is politeness of language. Fruitful achievements and greatefforts have also been made by scholars Lakoff, Watts and Leech, etc. However, in theface of an increase in studying politeness phenomena, our understanding ofimpoliteness, by contrast, has merely crawled forward. For rather a long period of time,the study of impoliteness has been treated as a peripheral phenomena and even an“poor cousin” of politeness of politeness. According to Eelen (1999) and Culpeper et al.(2003), although all the politeness theorists refer to the notion of impoliteness, yet intheir practical study, they still focus solidly on politeness and their comments onimpoliteness are either descriptively inadequate or conceptually biased. Concepts usedto explain politeness are straightforwardly applied to account for impoliteness (Eelen,1999, 2001), so “some sort of framework is needed to account for such linguisticbehavior” (Bousfield, 2008: 71). In his newly published book entitled Impoliteness inInteraction, Bousfield (2008) proposes a simplified impoliteness model mainly on thebasis of the impoliteness theories of Culpeper (1996, 2005), Culpeper et al (2003) andLachenicht (1980), namely, the“On-/Off- record impoliteness” model.Impoliteness is of great social importance indeed. Culpeper et al. (2003) showsclearly that impoliteness and conflict interactions, far from being peripheral behavior,are universal to all sorts of discourses, such as TV talk shows, literary works andfamily interaction. Talk Shows like If You Are the One （《非诚勿扰》）have attractedpeople’s attention by deliberately stimulating conflict.
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1.2 Research Objectives
This thesis attempts to analyze the verbal impoliteness in Fortress Besieged withthe help of rapport management theory. The present study is aimed to seek answers tothe following questions:1) What advantages does rapport management theory have in analyzing verbalimpoliteness in Fortress Besieged?2) What are the ways to interpret verbal impoliteness under the theory of rapportmanagement?
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Chapter Twoliterature review

In the previous chapter, we have explained that although impoliteness theory isrelatively new, yet it is developing fast and has been applied into different fields. Inthis chapter, a review of critical studies on impoliteness theory will be given. Beforewe begin our discussion of the studies on verbal impoliteness, a brief overview ofFortress Besieged and impoliteness is necessary.

2.1 Studies on Fortress Besieged
In this part, a literature review on Fortress Besieged will be showed, which acts asa basis for the subsequent study. A brief introduction of the novel and also a briefoverview of the previous researches on the novel in a chronological order areincorporated.Fortress Besieged is the only long novel by Qian Zhongshu, which is an indicatorof his outstanding language ability. Fortress Besieged is well-known for its vividlanguage which is common among people from almost all social walks. Many of the