Social Behaviour in Police Interviews: Relating Data to Theories - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 319

impolite. Complementary to B&L's positive and negative politeness strategies,
Culpeper et al. ( 2003 ) describe impoliteness strategies.

Positive impoliteness Damaging the addressee's positive face wants by exclud-
ing him or her, being disinterested, disassociating oneself from the addressee or
using taboo words. For example, “Just bloody tell me where you were that night,
so I can go home.”
Negative impoliteness Damaging the addressee's negative face wants by being
condescending, frightening him or her or invading his or her space. For example,
“Tell me right now where you were that night, or I'll lock you up till Monday.”

16.3.2.1 Corpus Example

On multiple occasions in the van Bron scenario, the suspect demands that the
interview takes place according to his wishes. He does this mostly by using
sentences that are short and direct, such as “You have to shut your mouth!” when
he does not receive ample time to speak and expressing his disinterest by replying
to the police with short answers (“It just is.”). The first utterance is an example of
an attack on the police officer's negative face, as the suspect invades his space and
claims room for himself in the conversation. The second may not come across as
a direct attack on the police officer's face, but it does impose on his positive face,
as it indicates that the suspect does not want to cooperate and does not approve
of the police officer. Impoliteness is not limited to solely being used by suspects:
police officers use impolite utterances as well. This happens frequently when the
police confront a suspect with a lie or an incriminating fact. For example, in the
Huls scenario the officer is bald on-record and says “I think you took the money.”
Even though police interviews can be uncooperative dialogues, politeness is
still abundantly used. For example, in the Huls scenario a police officer explicitly
expresses his approval of the suspect's behaviour: “I think it's decent of you that you
try to support your family financially.” This can be seen as an example of positive
politeness, as the police officer takes the suspect's wants (of being approved) into
account. In the Motor scenario, an example of negative politeness can be found, as a
police officer tries not to impose too much on the suspect's freedom (his autonomy)
by saying “I hope you don't mind too much to have this conversation with me.”

16.3.2.2 Systems Using This Concept

Based on B&L's definition of politeness, several systems have incorporated virtual
agents that can use utterances that vary in politeness. One of the first of these
systems was designed by Walker et al. ( 1997 ) and involved asking a waiter for
drinks with varying degrees of politeness, based on B&L's theory . Work by Gupta
et al. ( 2007 ) continued this line of research by creating POLLy, a virtual agent that
assisted users in learning English as a second language. This agent took into account