The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness

Despite the importance of the non-verbal aspect in the realisation and interpretation of impoliteness, studies that tackle impoliteness in its multimodal fullness are rather rare. This dissertation around the multimodal realisation of impoliteness in comics is an attempt to remedy this gap. It specifically explores the forms and functions of impoliteness in British and Lebanese comic anthologies, thereby also looking into potential country-specific practices and preferences. In doing so, it addresses a secondary aim of the research, which is to gauge the applicability of the adopted impoliteness model in a multimodal medium in two disparate contexts. Informed mainly by the integrative pragmatics approach and a cognitive-based multimodal approach to the study of comics, the study focuses on the inter-character interactions that may have elicited an evaluation of impoliteness among any of the participant-characters or readers/analysts. Similarities in the realisation of impoliteness in the two countries’ comics are noted, and differences and areas of interest are highlighted and examined through a cultural lens. A number of non-verbal features accompanying impoliteness behaviours are shown to occur with a frequency that suggests that they have become conventionalised for impoliteness and are an important part of the contexts that constitute impoliteness. Moreover, while serving as a source of affective release and creative entertainment, impoliteness in comics is also frequently revealed to be a resource for challenging and renegotiating the characters’ power dynamics and social identities. Lastly, the aptness of the adopted impoliteness model at guiding the analysis of impoliteness phenomena in a previously unexplored medium and context is substantiated.

Impoliteness in British and Lebanese comic anthologies

The importance of international collaboration in the research field is well-documented, but its impact on the number of citations received by research publications is not fully understood. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the relationship between international collaboration and other factors and the number of citations for research publications. Using data from the Lebanese American University, the authors employ ordinary least squares estimation to analyze the impact of international collaboration on the number of citations while controlling for various publications, authorship, university, and socioeconomic factors. The results show that international collaboration has a statistically significant positive effect on the number of citations. Based on these findings, we recommend that institutions and researchers seeking to increase the number of citations for their publications should focus on building and maintaining strong international collaborations and publishing in high-quality journals. This paper provides evidence of the importance of international collaboration for researchers seeking to increase the reach and impact of their publications. It also provides insights into the relevance of other factors, such as the number of publications, age, and journal rank.

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The Role of International Research Collaboration and Faculty Related Factors in Publication Citations: Evidence from Lebanon

This study investigates the possible application of impoliteness strategies to discourse on the 2020 Nigerian #EndSARS protest on Twitter. Examining impoliteness strategies employed in tweets and comments on the #EndSARS protest in Nigeria, identifying the most used impoliteness strategy(ies) and contextualising identified strategies remain the study’s preoccupation. The data, drawn from 350 tweets to 100 tweets and 250 comments with the hashtag #EndSARS, are descriptively analysed based on the tenets of Culpeper’s anatomy of impoliteness. The findings of the study reveal the presence of five impoliteness strategies in tweets and comments with the hashtag #EndSARS with no manifestation of off-record impoliteness. It is found that face threatening acts (FTAs) are both culture- and context-specific; membership categorisation and impoliteness strategies especially bald-on-record and negative impoliteness work hand in hand to produce the full effect. The study establishes further that the interplay of prior knowledge and actual situation knowledge gives rise to bald-on-record impoliteness while also noting that conjunctions, adverbs, and modal auxiliary verbs depending on their manner of application are capable of triggering impoliteness. The study, therefore, concludes that context, together with turns preceding and succeeding any turn construction unit (TCU), are strong determinants of impoliteness in any discourse. 

An analysis of impoliteness as the oppositional discourse in the Nigerian #EndSARS protest

Joe Blann’s (2011) comic ‘Things We had’ is a complex and nuanced multimodal realisation of a tense interaction between a couple, rendered through the subtle interplay of narration, panel compositi...

Lina Mourad

Papers

Impoliteness and power dynamics in intimate interactions: An analysis of Joe Blann’s ‘Things We Had’: