Impoliteness Strategies and Children’s Verbal Behavior: An Analytical Study of Disney’s The Lion King

Abstract

This research seeks to identify the relationship between impoliteness strategies employed in children movies and the verbal behavior of the children who watch these movies. For the sake of the research, the children movie The Lion King is chosen. The research adopts a descriptive qualitative method based on Culpeper's models of impoliteness (1996; 2011). Quantitative data is used to support the analysis. Additionally, a questionnaire is built to examine the relationship between the identified impoliteness utterances and the verbal behavior of the children. This questionnaire is applied to the parents of the children who watched the movie. The results indicated that all the impoliteness strategies suggested by Culpeper in 1996 and 2011 are employed. The results of the questionnaire indicate that children's verbal behavior is influenced by the impoliteness utterances employed in the movie.