The guiltive is a term introduced by

John Haiman John Michael Haiman (born 1946) is an American linguist and professor at Macalester College. He has done fieldwork on the Hua language of Papua New-Guinea and has published on Khmer, Rhaeto-Romance and Germanic linguistics. In 1989 he received a ...

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 Guilty or The Guilty may refer to: * Guilt (emotion), an experience that occurs when a person believes they have violated a moral standard Law *Culpability, the degree to which an agent can be held responsible for action or inaction *Guilt (law) ...

. 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 inflection ...

: 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. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or simply eccentric in ano ...

, 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 of ...

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