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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 21:3 (2022) ► pp.391–412

Strategic functions of linguistic impoliteness in US primary election debates

| University of Vechta
Since presidential primary debates in US election campaigns serve the function of identifying the most promising nominee for the subsequent presidency, they constitute a highly adversarial multilogue. Debaters do not only exchange factual arguments but also use diverse forms of impoliteness geared towards damaging the public image of political opponents and persuading audiences to vote accordingly. Combining political discourse analysis with pragmatic approaches to impoliteness, this paper examines the ways in which verbal aggression in debates inflicts damage on the addressee’s positive and negative face. On the basis of five Democratic and five Republican debates from 2016, it is shown that impolite utterances fulfil the four central strategic functions of (a) delegitimization, (b) coercion, (c) entertainment, and (d) (self-)defence, all of which support the macro-function of political persuasion through the construction of personal preferability.
Keywords: impoliteness, face-threatening act, political debate, primary election, delegitimization, coercion, entertainment, (self-)defence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Impolite politics
  • 2.Approaches to linguistic impoliteness
  • 3.The discourse situation in primary election debates
  • 4.Datset and method
  • 5.Strategic functions of impoliteness in debates
    • 5.1Delegitimizing impoliteness
      • (a)Deauthorization
      • (b)Moral devaluation
    • 5.2Coercive impoliteness
      • (a)Local conversation management
      • (b)Discursive non-cooperation
    • 5.3Entertaining impoliteness
      • (a)Conversational behaviour
      • (b)Professional competence
    • 5.4(Self-)defensive impoliteness
      • (a)Quality face
      • (b)Social identity face
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 7 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20041.sch
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