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Perhaps we should work on that section here.  Here's the text, which I've started making an effort to clean up... although it needs a lot more work.
Oh, and the page should probably be all Harvard refs, rather than none:  Wikipedia usually sticks with the style chosen by the first author.    

Instrumental rudeness and pragmatic competence
Sometimes, people deliberately employ rude behaviors to achieve a goal.  Early works in linguistic pragmatism interpreted rudeness as a defective mode of communication.  However, most rudeness serves functional or instrumental purposes in communication, and skillfully choosing when and how to be rude may indicate a person's pragmatic competence.  

Prior to the mid-1990s, most linguistics research ignored the instrumental or 'useful' nature of rudeness in speech (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Grice, 1975; Lakoff, 1973).  Before then, rudeness was seen as a sign of communication failure:  Lakoff gave ""two rules"" of pragmatic competence (1973): be clear, and be polite. Grice (1975) believed that rudeness violated universal norms of conversation of truthfulness, politeness and relevancy.  Likewise,  Brown and Levinson's politeness framework (1987  pp. 60-61) is also based on the idea that politeness is normative and rudeness is eschewed even when engaging in 'face-threatening acts' (FTAs) such as making a complaints or refusing a request.  ""The semantics and pragmatics of utterances must be taken into account in assessing degree of face redress; if the overt content of an utterance is rude, for example, politeness strategies won’t necessarily redeem it."" (Brown & Levinson, 1987, p. 22)

Robin Lakoff (1989) addressed what she named 'strategic rudeness,' a style of communication used by prosecutors and therapists to force their interlocutors (a courtroom defendant or patient) to talk or react in a certain way.  

Gabriele Kasper (1990) gives us the earliest definition of rudeness in an academic paper.   In her discussion of Lakoff's (1989) research on strategic rudeness, Kasper (1990) defines rudeness as speech that is ""constituted by deviation from whatever counts as politic in a given social context, is inherently confrontational and disruptive to social equilibrium"" (Kasper, 1990, p. 208).  This definition is important, in that it marks rudeness as speech which is confrontational at its core.  Although Kasper (1990) further defines rudeness as 'motivated' and 'unmotivated,' her definitions do not make use of natural data.  

It is not until Leslie Beebe's research comes along in the early to mid-1990s that data on naturally occurring instances of rudeness in everyday conversation is collected.  Drawing from Lakoff's (1989) idea of strategic rudeness, Beebe (1993a, 1993b, 1994, 1995) similarly proposes the concept of instrumental rudeness; rudeness that is meant to achieve a goal.  Like Lakoff (1989) and Kasper (1990), Beebe (1995) believes that rudeness is confrontational behaviour, and indeed in her research, she found that ""hostility seemed to pervade the data"" (Beebe, 1995, p. 156).   In her study of naturally occurring rudeness in New York City, Beebe (1995) provides her own definition of rudeness:

""In this study, rudeness is defined as a face threatening act (FTA)- or feature of an FTA such as intonation- which violates a socially sanctioned norm of interaction for the social context in which it occurs.  It is only rudeness if it receives insufficient redressive action to mitigate its force or, of course, if it does not occur in a context, such as intimacy or emergency, that would negate the need for redressive action.  Consequently, it causes antagonism, discomfort, or conflict and results in some disruption to the social harmony.   The idea that socially sanctioned norms of interaction are violated is central to the perception of rudeness."" (Beebe, 1995, p. 159)

In this definition, Beebe (1995) asserts that rudeness is an FTA, or a feature of an FTA, that has not been mitigated by redressive action and does not occur between intimates or in emergency situations.  Essentially, rudeness is a bald, on-record face attack, and not a failed attempt at politeness.  This definition would also most likely preclude culturally-specific ritual insults, verbal games, or manners of speech that are used among members of certain social groups.   Labov (1972) argues that ritual insults, or 'sounding,' follow certain linguistic, organizational, and interactional rules.   If such speech among members of a cultural in-group could be seen as following 'socially sanctioned norms of interaction' (as Labov, 1972, argues) where there is a low risk of face-loss, it would most likely not be considered 'rude speech,' according to Beebe's (1995) definition of rudeness.  Beebe (