Impoliteness, broadly understood as intentional communicative behaviour aimed at damaging or threatening the face of interactants, has become a key pragmatic concept extensively examined within linguistic scholarship (Bousfield, 2008; Cook and Burdelski, 2017; Culpeper, 1996). Culpeper (1996, 2005), extending the face-based politeness framework proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), conceptualises impoliteness into five super-strategies: bald-on-record, positive, negative, sarcasm or mock, and withholding. Specifically, bald-on-record impoliteness refers to direct, explicit face-threatening acts performed without mitigation (e.g., straightforward insults or explicit accusations). Positive impoliteness deliberately attacks the addressee’s positive face (the desire to be appreciated and approved), employing strategies such as exclusion, criticism, or the use of derogatory terms and inappropriate identity markers. Negative impoliteness targets the interactants’ negative face (the wish to remain autonomous and free from imposition), and can manifest through strategies including threats, condescension, or intentional interruptions. Sarcasm or mock politeness involves the superficially polite utterance where context reveals its clear opposite, functioning as a covert insult or mockery. Withholding politeness involves the deliberate omission of expected politeness strategies, marking hostility through notable absence rather than explicit presence.

To facilitate clearer comprehension and practical analysis, Culpeper (1996, pp. 357–358) initially outlined specific output strategies, identifying various linguistic realisations of impoliteness. Complementing Culpeper’s original list, Bousfield (2008, pp. 126–135) further enriched the taxonomy by adding variants such as “criticise,” “challenge,” and “enforce role shift,” all of which have been integrated into the following comprehensive summary as presented in Table 1:

It should be noted that the output strategies here are not closed lists (Culpeper, 2016, p. 425; see also “this list is not exhaustive”, Culpeper, 1996, p. 357), nor forced corresponding lists. Differences in communicative settings and participant relationships significantly influence the form and perception of impoliteness expressions (Culpeper, 2011; Haugh and Culpeper, 2018).

Building on long-standing discussions of reciprocity in anthropology and sociology, recent pragmatics has articulated a principled account of how reciprocity organises (im)politeness in interaction. In classical (im)politeness theories, reciprocity was largely implicit or peripheral, for instance, as equity (Spencer-Oatey, 2008) or balance (Ohashi, 2010) in rapport management. Culpeper and Tantucci (2021), on the other hand, offer an explicit definition for this tendency of (im)politeness exchange, defining the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity (PIR) as a motivation and constraint that places moral pressure on interactants to match the perceived or anticipated (im)politeness of others, so as to keep a balance of payments, i.e., credits created by polite conduct and debits created by impolite conduct, updated across turns. The balance draws on inferences from prior moves and on audience design regarding expected next moves, and it is sensitive to contextual asymmetries, such as power relations (Blitvich and Sifianou, 2019; Culpeper et al., 2021) which can license departures from straightforward matching. In short, the PIR captures a socio-moral tendency to align one’s (im)politeness to that of one’s co-participant so that the account book of rights and obligations remains broadly even.

The principle divides into two patterns, that is, matching and mismatching. Matching is the default realisation of (im)politeness according to the PIR. Along turn-taking, utterances encoded with politeness invite proportionately polite response, while impolite initiatives are frequently met with impoliteness in kind, a tit-for-tat pattern that both restores face and resists coercion, and which is further fuelled by affective stimulation. Nevertheless, matching can be relative to roles and institutions, that is, asymmetric roles that require one party to be “one step more polite” for the interaction to count as reciprocally aligned. Culpeper and colleagues (Culpeper et al., 2021), for instance, found that in dialogues from early modern English works, whilst reciprocity of politeness widely found, social roles and their corresponding relative power relations can play a role in influencing the payment of thanks: the higher the social status of the thankers, for instance, a king, the lower the effort made to use “thanks” as politeness markers to reciprocate the gift. Thus, the PIR explains both the everyday smoothness of (im)politeness matching and the commonness of reciprocal impoliteness in adversarial settings, while also predicting that power may recalibrate what counts as a “match.”

Mismatching, on the other hand, is seen as an abnormal situation and occurs when second parts shift upwards with more degree of politeness than expected, or downwards with more degree of impoliteness. This markedness triggers (im)politeness implicatures via Levinson’s M-heuristic, what’s said in an abnormal way isn’t normal: upward shifts invite readings such as magnanimity or accommodation, while downward shifts invite readings such as rejection or contempt, all modulated by local norms and role expectations. Empirically, mismatching clusters at the salient ends of the scale: strong upward or strong downward shifts occur more often than fine-grained “weak” adjustments, and a simple “OK” often fails to match an extra-polite first move; perceptual granularity also degrades at the high end of impoliteness, making degrees hard to discriminate.

Recent studies have explored the potential of the PIR to be developed into an analytical lens through observing both matching and mismatching: matching is seen as the default, whereas mismatches are rarer but pragmatically marked, prompting strong implicatures (Culpeper and Tantucci, 2021). While researchers have applied the PIR to examine the exchange of politeness in cooperative contexts, such as in medical consultation (Tantucci and Lepadat, 2024), comparative and network-analytic work further shows that PIR is equally applicable to examine impoliteness in more hostile, confronting contexts, where third-party participation, sarcasm and resonance shape impoliteness chains and escalation (Culpeper et al., 2025). In political communication, especially adversarial parliamentary questioning, impolite initiatives are frequently met with impolite returns, as tit-for-tat patterns modulated by power, consistent with PIR (Culpeper and Tantucci, 2021). Taken together, these insights highlight the PIR’s socio-moral mechanism that organises the distribution and interpretation of (im)politeness across turns; building on this framework, the present study investigates how impoliteness strategies are deployed and how reciprocity patterns (match vs. mismatch) are realised in the political settings.

Building on the methodology, we now shift to the detailed results. Given that an Oval Office press spray typically constrains overt face-threats, the first step is to locate when impoliteness becomes interactionally relevant (Haugh, 2015) in this event. Impoliteness instances identified in the Trump–Zelenskyy Oval Office meeting can be temporally situated and qualitatively classified. We visualise the occurrence of impoliteness throughout the event, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The identified pattern demonstrates a clear temporal clustering: the majority of impoliteness instances intensively emerge in the final ten minutes (40:00–50:00). By contrast, the earlier sections show relatively few instances of overt impoliteness in direct verbal exchanges between Trump and Zelenskyy: the first ten minutes (0:00–10:00) contain only minimal face-threatening activity; the middle section (10:00–40:00), largely consisting of exchanges between the presidents and journalists, is similarly sparse in impoliteness instances, given the context as a formal presidential conversation with media audience presence, as an institutional constraint (Holmes and Schnurr, 2017).

The final segment, from 40:00 to 50:00, thus constitutes the main-stage as the focal point of our analysis. Figure 2 offers a more detailed depiction of the temporal distribution of impoliteness instances, measured at half-minute intervals. This section immediately follows Vance’s engagement (40:49), which operates as a reciprocity trigger (Culpeper and Tantucci, 2021), that is, a triggering event that recalibrates the interactional exchange of impoliteness. The discourse thereby shifts from transactional and cooperative to adversarial and evaluative: prior to this point, both Trump and Zelenskyy maintain a relatively neutral exchange by employing politeness and mitigation devices to sustain diplomatic decorum (van Burgsteden et al., 2025); after Vance’s intervention, however, the conversation becomes saturated with evaluative stance-taking, interruptions, and explicit face-threats, marking a reorientation of interactional goals (Haugh, 2015; Spencer-Oatey, 2009). The ensuing discourse can be characterised as Briggs (1997, p. 456) calls a “conflictual exchange,” where impoliteness serves both as an instrument of control and a display of impoliteness dynamics.

Building upon this temporal mapping, the next analytical step involves a categorisation of impoliteness across participants. Following Bousfield’s (2008) taxonomy and Culpeper’s (2016) refinement of impoliteness strategies, all identified instances were classified according to their pragmatic realisation types and further grouped into five macro-categories: bald on record, positive, negative, off-record, and sarcasm/mock impoliteness, as listed in Table 2. This classificatory procedure enables a systematic comparison between interactants and can reveal the patterned asymmetries in their strategic orientations.

Trump’s repeated disassociation act, “you don’t know that,” “don’t tell us” and “don’t tell us what we’re going to feel”, constitutes a direct withdrawal of common ground. The second-person plural in “don’t tell us” broadens the out-grouping move by aligning Trump with a larger in-group “us” and casting Zelenskyy as epistemically out-of-place. Sequentially, Trump’s repetition “don’t tell us […]” works as persistence pressure, foreclosing repair and blocking alignment; Zelenskyy’s “I am not dictating” is a mitigated denial that fails to restore common ground, leaving Trump’s role re-framed as the arbiter of permissible knowledge claims. By invalidating Zelenskyy’s experiential footing, Trump discredits Zelenskyy’s epistemic authority (Heritage and Raymond, 2005) and, at the same time, reinforces a hierarchical distance between the two interlocutors. Such acts of disassociation thus rupture alignment and redefine participant roles, functioning as positive impoliteness.

Trump’s recurrent use of seeking disagreement, often in the form of denial, similarly, plays the role of distancing:

Extract 2

Trump’s positive impoliteness operates through overt challenges to Zelenskyy’s previous remark, in this case, “he’s not speaking loudly” as a direct denial of Zelenskyy’s “if you will speak very loudly about the war”, thus inviting or even compelling conflictual uptake. The repetition of directives “no no” and “wait a minute” further asserts dominance through conversational control that shifts the topic of the conversation. The topic shift coerced by Trump signals his refusal to participate in the affiliative manner Zelenskyy attempts to maintain. Two additional aggravators display here: first, third-person reference “he’s not speaking loudly” addressing Zelenskyy is an exclusionary footing shift, treating the addressee as if absent, which compounds ignoring; second, the stacked directives “wait a minute / no, no” enact turn-denial, evidenced by Zelenskyy’s repeated, unsuccessful entry bids “can I […]”, which remain unratified. The coupling of seeking disagreement with turn-denial explains why this sequence both escalates conflict and locks Zelenskyy out of topic management. The act of deliberately seeking disagreement thereby serves a metacommunicative purpose (van Burgsteden, et al., 2025) by performing a dual function: it undermines the other’s positive face while, more significantly, simultaneously reaffirming the speaker’s control of the whole conversation.

Throughout the conversation, “using taboo words” as one specific strategy of positive impoliteness is frequently (N = 6) and only used by Trump. Taboo words rarely appear in isolation; rather, in line with most naturally occurring face-to-face interactions, taboo language tends to co-occur with other impoliteness formulae (Culpeper and Hardaker, 2017), strategically amplifying face-threatening. In Trump’s discourse, taboo words often accompany speech acts that explicitly associate the other with a negative aspect of impoliteness, that is, the use of negative impoliteness:

Extract 3

In earlier Extracts 1 and 2, Trump’s impoliteness remains primarily relational, working through disagreement and conversational control; here, however, it assumes an evaluative force that redefines the opponent’s social worth. Trump’s uses of taboo words reflect how impoliteness operates through an intricate interplay between directness and evaluative escalation. Trump’s “you have a damn good chance” inserts “damn” as a swearword interjection (Kienpointner and Stopfner, 2017), which is not commonly used in formal political communication. Meanwhile, Trump’s phrase “we gave you through this stupid president $350 billion” merges a taboo term “stupid” with the act of explicitly associating the other with a negative aspect, a classic instance of negative impoliteness. The immediate lexical target of “stupid” is a third party, yet its interactional uptake indexes Zelenskyy as morally beholden and epistemically subordinate (i.e., the aid is framed as a reluctant favour, the recipient as insufficiently grateful). This co-articulation exemplifies how negative impoliteness can be linguistically intensified through taboo lexis, thereby producing a compounded face threat that simultaneously attacks both the target’s competence and autonomy. The attack by “stupid” is multi-layered: textually, Zelenskyy as the president of Ukraine is demeaned, threatening his moral or political legitimacy; the tone further recontextualises the value of the aid as an act of reluctant generosity; and the expectation of Zelenskyy’s gratitude is eventually foregrounded and reinforced. The result is an utterance that undermines Zelenskyy’s moral stance and highlights, as it were, the lack of Zelenskyy’s expected gratitude, while reasserting Trump’s benefactor position. Trump’s hostile addresses, by means of the interjection of taboo words, can thus be readily categorised under multiple formulae of impoliteness strategies (Culpeper and Hardaker, 2017), within which cumulative face-threatening effects are produced.

By contrast, Zelenskyy’s impoliteness largely takes the form of negative impoliteness, most commonly observed through violating the structure of conversation (N = 40). These violations often occur as overlapping speech rather than successful interruptions, reflecting Zelenskyy’s attempts to resist control within a turn-taking system dominated by Trump. Violating sentence structure conventionally represents the speaker’s control of the conversation, since interruptions inherently challenge the speaker’s right to speak, negating the validity and significance of their perspective (Bousfield, 2008, p. 127; Culpeper, 1996). However, in this case, Zelenskyy’s interruptions tend to fail to play such a role, characterised by forming a manner of overlapping instead of interruption. Consider overlapping lines in Extracts 2 and 3, and the following:

Extract 4:

Here, Zelenskyy’s repetitions within overlaps, “I said thanks […],” constitute efforts to reassert participation rights and restore epistemic balance. Yet Zelenskyy’s attempted turn-seizures are met by Trump’s compound aggravation: ignoring/snubbing (failing to ratify Zelenskyy’s bids) (N = 22), explicit negative evaluation “you haven’t been alone”, and continued credit-claiming culminating in indebtedness-on-record, neutralising Zelenskyy’s moves and reclaiming topical authority. This reciprocal pattern, where one participant’s impoliteness is immediately countered by another’s higher-intensity impoliteness, helps Trump to assert dominance over Zelenskyy as the opponent and, simultaneously, to claim conversational authority and redirect the discussion in Trump’s favour (Martínez Abellán, 2024). By disregarding Zelenskyy’s attempt to take over turn-taking rules, Trump manifested “clear hostility or disdain”, actively undermining Zelenskyy’s conversational rights (Suryawanshi, 2020, p. 61).

Zelenskyy’s impoliteness, in a word, appears more reactive rather than initiatory, that is, it emerges as a defence mechanism rather than an offensive strategy. His overlapping turns do not shift topics but instead echo or minimally contest Trump’s assertions. These moments highlight Zelenskyy’s constrained agency within the context of formal inter-presidential conversation, where impoliteness functions less as aggression and more as self-assertion under pressure.

Vance’s engagement is more limited but nonetheless significant. His interjections, including the first interruption and a few later, which interrupt an ongoing adjacency pair between Trump and Zelenskyy, obviously represent a violating the structure of conversation that breaches the expected turn-taking order. At the same time, concerning its implicature conveyed through Vance’s remark, these impoliteness instances can be seen as cases of off-record impoliteness:

Extract 5:

Functionally, Vance’s engagement reframes the dyadic exchange into a triadic contest, with Vance aligning himself with Trump. This verbal attack is carried through implicature rather than direct insult: Vance’s rhetorical question carries a presupposition of Zelenskyy’s non-thanking, “you have not said thank you”. This verbal attack simultaneously threatens Zelenskyy’s negative face (autonomy) and positive face (moral character). Vance’s utterance thereby constructs an instance of “implicational impoliteness”, and the interruption per se can be seen as a “trigger for implicational impoliteness” (Culpeper, 2011, p. 17). It triggers both Trump and Zelenskyy to perform more intensified facework, that is, Impoliteness is more frequently applied as a means of face-attack, interactionally co-constructed and sequentially contagious, following Vance’s engagement.

Taken together, Extracts 1–5 reveal a coherent configuration: Trump typically combines positive impoliteness, including disassociation, seeking disagreement, ignoring/snubbing with negative impoliteness moves, often intensified by taboo lexis; Zelenskyy counters primarily through negative impoliteness as defence, including attempted interruptions/overlaps that assert participation rights yet rarely achieve topic control; Vance contributes off-record impoliteness that reframes the exchange from dyadic conflicts to triadic contest. These choices jointly account for the main-stage clustering of instances and the asymmetry in strategy deployment.