Congratulations to graduate student Mike Furman, who has recently had his paper "Impoliteness and mock-impoliteness: A descriptive analysis" accepted for publication in the forthcoming edited volume Approaches to Slavic Interaction (John Benjamins, edited by Nadine Thielemann and Peter Kosta). 

This paper explores the concept of mock-impoliteness by examining the ways in which interactants produce and display an orientation to impolite and mock-impolite utterances in colloquial Russian conversation. The data came from the Russian reality television show Dom Dva ('House Two'), from which Mike analyzed interactions among the show's cast members. He looked at how the cast members identified, responded to, and positioned themselves relative to impolite and mock-impolite utterances. The analysis reveals that impoliteness and mock-impoliteness are not strictly linguistic in nature, but are also expressed through non-linguistic behavior as well (through laughter, pauses and body language). Additionally, the paper demonstrates that the meaning of an utterance is far from fixed, but is instead actively created and negotiated by the people involved in an interaction.

More generally, Mike's work bridges the fields of linguistics and cultural studies, looking at how language is used within cultural and interactional contexts. His use of creative data sources -- like Russian reality television -- has gained him a reputation as a highly entertaining speaker, in addition to being a serious scholar.

Well done, Mike!