Perhaps we should work on that section here  Heres the text which Ive 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 persons pragmatic competence    Prior to the mids most linguistics research ignored the instrumental or useful nature of rudeness in speech Brown  Levinson  Grice  Lakoff   Before then rudeness was seen as a sign of communication failure  Lakoff gave two rules of pragmatic competence  be clear and be polite Grice  believed that rudeness violated universal norms of conversation of truthfulness politeness and relevancy  Likewise  Brown and Levinsons politeness framework   pp  is also based on the idea that politeness is normative and rudeness is eschewed even when engaging in facethreatening 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 wont necessarily redeem it Brown  Levinson  p   Robin Lakoff  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  gives us the earliest definition of rudeness in an academic paper   In her discussion of Lakoffs  research on strategic rudeness Kasper  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  p   This definition is important in that it marks rudeness as speech which is confrontational at its core  Although Kasper  further defines rudeness as motivated and unmotivated her definitions do not make use of natural data    It is not until Leslie Beebes research comes along in the early to mids that data on naturally occurring instances of rudeness in everyday conversation is collected  Drawing from Lakoffs  idea of strategic rudeness Beebe a b   similarly proposes the concept of instrumental rudeness rudeness that is meant to achieve a goal  Like Lakoff  and Kasper  Beebe  believes that rudeness is confrontational behaviour and indeed in her research she found that hostility seemed to pervade the data Beebe  p    In her study of naturally occurring rudeness in New York City Beebe  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  p   In this definition Beebe  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 onrecord face attack and not a failed attempt at politeness  This definition would also most likely preclude culturallyspecific ritual insults verbal games or manners of speech that are used among members of certain social groups   Labov  argues that ritual insults or sounding follow certain linguistic organizational and interactional rules   If such speech among members of a cultural ingroup could be seen as following socially sanctioned norms of interaction as Labov  argues where there is a low risk of faceloss it would most likely not be considered rude speech according to Beebes  definition of rudeness  Beebe