The guiltive is a term introduced by
John Haiman
John Michael Haiman (31 Jan 1946 – 7 April 2025) was an American linguist and professor emeritus at Macalester College. He did fieldwork on the Hua language (PNG), Hua language of Papua New-Guinea and published on Khmer language, Khmer, Rhaeto-Ro ...
for the
speaker attitude whereby the speaker overtly presents themself as generous or indifferent but actually means the opposite of what they are saying, with the intention of making the addressee feel
guilty.
The guiltive is similar to
sarcasm
Sarcasm is the caustic use of words, often in a humorous way, to mock someone or something. Sarcasm may employ ambivalence, although it is not necessarily ironic. Most noticeable in spoken word, sarcasm is mainly distinguished by the inflectio ...
: in both, the speaker's ostensible message is accompanied by a derived metamessage "This message is bogus." In sarcasm this is overtly marked by the speaker (for example, using
intonation or caricatured formality), whereas in the guiltive, it is instead "left to be supplied by the addressee, who is thereby made to feel like a worm." The fact that the speaker still sounds sincere (albeit known not to be) suggests an affinity with polite language. But unlike
politeness
Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others and to put them at ease. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or ...
, the purpose of which is to avoid aggression, the guiltive is a form of
passive-aggressiveness intended to make the listener feel bad.
The name "guiltive" is formed with the ''-ive'' suffix, which is commonly used for the names of
grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement ...
s. But as with sarcasm, no language has been found to have
grammaticalized it.
References
Bibliography
*
*
* Contains an abridged version of .
*{{Cite journal, doi = 10.1515/lity.1998.2.1.125, volume = 2, issue = 1, pages = 125–139, last=Haspelmath, first = Martin, author-link = Martin Haspelmath, title = Review of ''Modality in Grammar and Discourse'', ed. by Joan Bybee and Suzanne Fleischman, journal = Linguistic Typology, date = 1998
Pragmatics
Irony