After Life: character development reflected through character-specific use of pragmatic (im)politeness

Soňa Haľková, Prešovská univerzita

Abstract: The British black comedy Netflix show After Life depicts the emotional journey of Tony, a middle-aged man whose wife dies of cancer. In grief, Tony’s formerly cheerful disposition changes and he begins to act rudely towards others, making (im)politeness a highly salient feature of the show. Over time, as Tony begins to accept his wife’s passing, his (im)politeness strategies also begin to shift. Tony’s communication is examined from a pragmalinguistic perspective utilizing third-wave politeness theory (D.Z. Kádár and M. Haugh, 2013) as well as impoliteness theories of J. Culpeper (2005, 2011, 2021). The data consists of three scenes connected with significant milestones in Tony’s healing journey selected across the three seasons of the show. To account for changes in (im)politeness strategies resulting from varying conversation partners, all of the selected scenes consist purely of conversations between Tony and his brother-in-law, Matt Braden. The research shows a marked shift in Tony’s (im)politeness behaviour as his character develops.

References

Culpeper, Jonathan, 2005. “Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: The Weakest Link.” In Journal of Politeness Research 1 (2005): 35–72.

Culpeper, Jonathan, 2011. Impoliteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Culpeper, Jonathan & Vittorio Tantucci, 2021. “The Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity.” Journal of Pragmatics 175, 146–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.008

Gervais, Ricky, 2019. After Life. Derek Productions Limited.

Kádár, Daniel Z. and Michael Haugh, 2013. Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keywords: politeness, impoliteness, pragmatics, After Life