“Sei un idiota!”

Observations on prosodic mock impoliteness in the Italian language

Abstract

This research aims to explore some prosodic aspects of mock impoliteness, a mismatch between the semantic meaning of an utterance and its actual communicative intention. Mock impoliteness has always been presented as the opposite of genuine impoliteness: while the former is considered a kind of impoliteness that does not intend to cause any offence to the recipient, the latter is a communicative strategy that aims to threaten the face of the recipient. This study intends to examine the phonetic and phonological cues of mock and genuine impoliteness, with a particular focus on how pitch range and mean intensity help distinguish between these two attitudes. The data showed that mock impoliteness is characterised by a less marked prosody than genuine impoliteness, with lower values for pitch range and mean intensity. Moreover, the two parameters are positively correlated. Finally, the phonological analysis showed that mock and genuine impoliteness have different distributions of their nuclear pitch accents.