Beyond relational work: a psycho-pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in Shakespeare’s King Lear

This paper offers a psycho-pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in Shakespeare’s King Lear at the intradiegetic level of communication. The paper’s main objective is to explore the extent to which impoliteness assessment is influenced by both the psychological traits of interlocutors motivated by their reality paradigms and the fictional participation of discourse participants, which targets a deeper understanding of the association between impoliteness, psychological dimensions of personality, and fictional participation in drama dialogue. The study is based on an eclectic framework by drawing inspiration from contributions in the field of impoliteness and relational work studies, with a special emphasis on Locher and Jucker’s (2021) list of the factors influencing relational work, together with reference to studies on the relationship between psychological dimensions of personality and language use, with a focus on Archer’s (2002) concept of reality paradigms. The paper has two main findings: first, psychological traits of interlocutors contribute significantly to the production, reception, and assessment of impoliteness and serve as antecedents of their verbal aggression; and, second, psychological impoliteness operates within a specific community of practice and has its own context-specific expectation frames.