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Part of
The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - group - collective
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 78] 2018
► pp. 205–226

The use of face-threatening acts in the construction of in- and out-group identities in British parliamentary debates

| University of Heidelberg, Germany

Identity construction is group membership construction in that humans bring their individual selves into being by declaring and performing their belonging to in-groups which are constructed in contrast to out-groups, as suggested in Tajfel’s theory of social identity. In parliamentary discourse, the establishment and reinforcement of in- and out-group identities is particularly important, since parliamentary discourse represents an institutionalized arguing game of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (between political parties). One decisive way in which these group identities are construed and maintained is through the use of face-threatening acts (FTAs), analyzed here in British House of Commons debates on health policy. A taxonomy of FTAs in this context is developed, allowing for an analysis of addressers and addressees, and close interpretation of examples leads to the conclusion that FTAs are used to denigrate the out-group and strengthen in-group identification at the same time.

Keywords: group identity, identity construction, face-threatening acts, impoliteness, parliament, House of Commons
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: In- and out-group identity construction and face
  • 2.Face-threatening acts in parliamentary discourse: A review with a focus on identity construction
  • 3.Identity construction through FTAs in House of Commons health debates
    • 3.1Categories of face-threatening acts
    • 3.2Addressers and addressees of face-threatening acts in the data
    • 3.3The effect of FTAs on face and group identity construction
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.78.09mol
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