(Im)politeness Rituals in The Young Pope and Teaching Pragmatics

The potential of audiovisual material in language teaching (Rodríguez Martín 2006; Kaiser 2011; Pavesi 2012; Bruti 2015, 2016a, 2016b), has been recognized, although there are still some reservations, mainly about its authenticity, that is, its comparability with spontaneous conversation (Baños Piñero and Chaume 2009; Rodríguez-Martín and Moreno-Jaén 2009; Al-Surmi 2012). By way of a case study, this contribution investigates (im)politeness in a recent production, The Young Pope (Sorrentino 2016), with a view to increasing English learners’ awareness of how it can be expressed verbally, with various degrees of explicitness, or entrusted to other semiotic resources. Given the nature of telecinematic texts and the limits imposed by narrative requirements and showing time, (im)politeness is stylized; that is, specific traits are chosen strategically to achieve narrative purposes, among them characterization (Queen 2015). A corpus-linguistic analysis of the main character’s speech serves to identify and highlight the most evident and explicit markers of impoliteness, and what could be seen as more subtle and hidden strategies to oppose his interlocutors.