ABSTRACT
The potential of audiovisual material in language teaching has been recognized, although reservations remain, mainly about its authenticity—that is, its comparability with spontaneous conversation. By way of a case study, this contribution investigates (im)politeness in a recent production, The Young Pope, with a view to increasing English learners’ awareness of how it can be expressed verbally with various degrees of explicitness, or entrusted to other semiotic resources. Given the nature of telecinematic texts and the limits imposed by narrative requirements and showing time, (im)politeness is stylized—that is, specific traits are chosen strategically to achieve narrative purposes, among them characterization. A corpus-linguistic analysis of the main character’s speech serves to identify and highlight the most evident and explicit markers of impoliteness, and what could be seen as more subtle and hidden strategies to oppose his interlocutors.
