Friendliness, Aggressiveness and Coarseness: Scottish Groundskeeper Willie’s Linguistic Features in The Simpsons

VIRDIS, DANIELA FRANCESCA

2012-01-01

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Abstract

Willie, one of the recurring characters in the American animated TV series The Simpsons (Twentieth Century Fox, 1989-present), is the head groundskeeper at the elementary school in the fictional town of Springfield, and a Scottish immigrant, fiery-tempered and almost feral in appearance and behaviour. In this article, I study the Scottish national-ethnic stereotypes in a corpus of Willie’s utterances, and I investigate his conversational style with the people living in Springfield using a pragmatic approach and Searle’s (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts. My research objective is to analyse whether his conversational style in the hyperbolic discourse of the comic series contributes to conveying a stereotypical perception of the Scottish national identity; I thereby attempt to distinguish and reveal the linguistic and interactional characteristics which construct the dramatis persona of Willie as conventionally Scottish and non-American. This pragmatic scrutiny has disclosed that the Scottish immigrant is attributed with such value-laden characteristics as friendliness, aggressiveness and coarseness, which can be directly connected with his Scottish national identity. Nevertheless, the conversations he participates in and the activities he undertakes characterise him as a grotesque and ludicrous victim of both adults and children in the American town of Springfield. Accordingly, on the one hand, the groundskeeper’s Scottishness is, as Gray (2006, p. 64) points out, depicted as hyper-stereotypical and, thus, as axiomatically parodistic, while this character’s main discursive role in the TV series is, according to Rodaway (2003, p. 163), to act as a foil to the American people in Springfield. However, on the other hand, the equation of a victim, repeatedly outwitted by children, with an immigrant, constructed as a verbal and visual other from American culture and identity, can actually be, in Gray’s (2006, p. 64) words again, “a rather high risk strategy”, even within the humorous discourse of this hyperbolic TV series.