Call-takers impoliteness in Estonian emergency calls.

The topic of the article is the linguistic impoliteness (rudeness, face attack) of call-takers towards the caller in Estonian emergency calls. The purpose of the research is to find out the social actions where impoliteness occurs, its triggers and the linguistic form of rudeness. The data consists of audio-recorded calls from the emergency call corpus of the University of Tartu. The analysis revealed that impoliteness could be divided into three groups: (a) reproaches to the caller, (b) rudely formulated questions, requests for information and directives and (c) rudely formulated refusals of help and unilateral closings of the call. Impoliteness is generally triggered by the caller. One group includes drunk or rude callers and callers who do not follow social norms of interaction. The second group consists of cases where the information provided by the caller does not meet the standards of the call-takers or the Emergency Response Center. Only in a few cases, the call-taker initiates an impolite social action without the influence of the caller. Estonian call-takers express rudeness using the similar means as in the other languages studied. Linguistic tools associated with rudeness are found in pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and techniques of formulating turns in dialogue. In particular, we highlight pragmatic particles/markers and unilateral closings that, as far as we know, have not been presented in previous literature.