A Study of Verbal Aggression in the Iranian Parliamentary Discourse from the Perspective of Culpeper's Linguistic Impoliteness and Aristotle's Framework of Rhetorical genres

In this research selections from the discourse of the Iranian tenth parliament(2016-2020), with the aim of identifying and analyzing verbal aggression, were examined. To this end, two different theoretical bases — Culpeper's impoliteness (2011), and Aristotelian Rhetoric (Kennedy, 2007), had been relied on so that occurrences of impoliteness in a selected number of question sessions could be identified, decision could be made on the inclusion of the utterances involving impoliteness in each of the Aristotelian Rhetorical genres. Research questions: Which of Culpeper’s impoliteness categories (2011) and how frequently are instantiated in the corpus of the research? What percent of utterances involving impoliteness could be considered as included in each of the judicial, deliberative and epideictic genres? The findings show that from among Culpeper’s categories (2011, 113 - 193), unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions and next insults, from conventionalized impoliteness formulas, and innuendos and next sarcastic comments, from implicational impoliteness, are instantiated most frequently. Some highly frequent linguistic expressions in the corpus are identified and presented as conventionalized impoliteness formulas in the discourse of (at least that period of) Iranian parliament. 70percent of the utterances which involved impoliteness are labeled as judicial and the remaining ones are labeled as deliberative and epideictic.