Politeness and impoliteness are two components of daily communication. Impolite language has effect on the relations among social actors (Bousfield and Locher, 2008). Different definitions have been suggested for impoliteness and it refers to the behavior, which causes damage to the face of the other parties in an interaction. Impoliteness is a new field of study and the number of studies done in this field is less than politeness (Culpeper, 2011). The present study seeks to investigate the types of impoliteness strategies used by characters in Jane Eyre based on Culpeper’s (2011) model of impoliteness. For this purpose, Jane Eyre and the Culpeper’s (2011) model of impoliteness were given to the three raters to identify the impoliteness strategies based on the adopted model. According to the rater's identification, 90 dialogues were approved to be impolite and were classified into three categories as affective strategies, coercive strategies, and entertaining strategies. In order to assure the agreement among raters, inter-rater reliability was calculated and showed a high correlation (0.87). The results of this study were obtained by quantitative and qualitative analyses and they revealed that the most dominant strategies used in this novel are the coercive strategies that are applied by Mr. Rochester. Affective strategies and Entertaining strategies are the second and third types of strategies that were identified to be used by Jane Eyre. The findings of this study can be applied to teaching literature, particularly novels to EFL learners and those who are majoring in English literature.
