A Socio-Cognitive Approach To Political Interaction: An Analysis of Candidates Discourses in U.S. Political Campaign Debates
The present research focuses on politeness in candidates' discourses in U.S. political campaign debates of the 2000 elections from a socio-cognitive approach to social interaction. This approach entails an eclectic perspective on communication that intends to account for its cognitive, linguistic, relational and socio-cultural aspects in a determinate communicative encounter. This eclectic perspective is based on Brown and Levinson's (1987) Politeness Theory on the one hand, and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (1986/1995) on the other hand, with the latter constituting a cognitive complement to the former on theoretical grounds. From this eclectic approach, politeness has been conceived as the context-sensitive cognitive-based linguistic instantiation of social bonds. Therefore, politeness constitutes the linguistic enactment of social relationships in a specific communicative situation, and the internal knowledge on what is appropriate or inappropriate therein underlying such enactment. Politeness may thus consist of a) 'mitigating' behaviour, whereby the speaker (S) attends to his/her own and/or the hearer's (H) face or social image one wants for him/herself in a specific society (Brown & Levinson, 1987), or b) 'aggravating' behaviour, that is, damage of one's own and/or H's face. In view of this, the following research questions were posited in this study: 1) what are the main features of politicians' face mitigating and aggravating sequences in terms of: type of politeness prevailing in these (if any), recurrent linguistic elements (if any), and typical location of these sequences in the whole discourse debates themselves constitute (if any)?; 2) what are the specific forms face mitigating and aggravating sequences adopt (if any), and which are their features?. In order to provide an answer to these questions, a total of 89 North-American electoral debates were collected together with other secondary data (e.g. newspaper articles, television programmes, etc.). These debates were organised into ...