The dominant view in linguistics nowadays is that impoliteness is purely a matter of situational assessments by speech participants. This volume challenges that orthodoxy. Bringing together studies on structures that convey insults, threats and more in a wide range of languages, it shows that there is, in fact, a formal side to impoliteness. The volume reveals shared features of and sources for grammatical expressions of impoliteness, explores ways in which their impolite character can be established and offers new insights into their diachrony.