Cover not available
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
References
Attardo, Salvatore
2008 “A Primer for the Linguistics of Humor.” In The Primer of Humor Research, ed. by Victor Raskin, 101–155. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beebe, Leslie M.
1995 “Polite Fictions: Instrumental Rudeness as Pragmatic Competence.” In Linguistics and the Education of Language Teachers: Ethnolinguistic, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistic Aspects, ed. by James E. Alatis, Carolyn A. Straehle, Brent Gallenberger, and Maggie Ronkin, 154–168. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Benoit, William L.
2014 Political Election Debates: Informing Voters about Policy and Character. Lanham: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Bousfield, Derek
2008 Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bousfield, Derek, and Miriam A. Locher
(eds) 2008 Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul
2004 Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul, and Christina Schäffner
2011 “Discourse and Politics.” In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 303–330. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
1996 “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 251: 349–367. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show ‘The Weakest Link’.” Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 35–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Impoliteness Strategies.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, ed. by Alessandro Capone, and Jacob L. Mey, 421–445. Switzerland: Springer International. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Claire Hardaker
2017 “Impoliteness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Z. Kádár, 199–225. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Z. Kádár
(eds) 2017 The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dailey, William O., Edward A. Hinck, and Shelly S. Hinck
2008 Politeness in Presidential Debates: Shaping Political Face in Campaign Debates from 1960 to 2004. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita
2011 “ ‘Here is the Difference, Here is the Passion, Here is the Chance to be Part of Great Change:’ Strategic Context Importation in Political Discourse.” In Context and Contexts: Parts meet Whole?, ed. by Anita Fetzer, and Etsuko Oishi, 115–146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
García-Pastor, María Dolores
2008 “Political Campaign Debates as Zero-sum Games: Impoliteness and Power in Candidates’ Exchanges.” In Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, ed. by Derek Bousfield, and Miriam A. Locher, 101–126. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Grice, Herbert P.
1975 “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Sandra
2001 “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 12 (4): 451–472. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael
2015 Im/Politeness Implicatures. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, Jean G., and Herbert W. Simons
2017 Persuasion in Society. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine
2013 “Politeness, Impoliteness, Non-Politeness, ‘Polirudeness’: The Case of Political TV Debates.” In Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness, ed. by Denis Jamet, and Manuel Jobert, 16–45. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Kienpointner, Manfred
1997 “Varieties of Rudeness: Types and Functions of Impolite Utterances.” Functions of Language 4 (2): 251–287. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Locher, Miriam A.
2004 Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Driscoll, Jim
2017 “Face and (Im)politeness.” The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Kádár, 89–118. London: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, Alan
2016 Presidential Debates: Risky Business on the Campaign Trail. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, Helen
2002 “Managing Rapport in Talk: Using Rapport Sensitive Incidents to Explore the Motivational Concerns Underlying the Management of Relations.” Journal of Pragmatics 341: 529–545. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tracy, Karen
2017 “Facework and (Im)politeness in Political Exchanges.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Kádár, 739–758. London: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Leeuwen, Theo
2018 “Legitimation and Multimodality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Bernhard Forchtner, 218–232. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Watts, Richard J.
2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woolley, John, and Gerhard Peters
1999– “The American Presidency Project (APP).” UC Santa Barbara. Accessed 10 October 2019. [URL]
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Hansson, Sten
2024. Coercive impoliteness and blame avoidance in government communication. Discourse, Context & Media 58 ► pp. 100770 ff. DOI logo
Mensah, Eyo, Samson Nzuanke & Theophilus Adejumo
2022. Giving a Dog a Bad Name: The Strategic Use of Labelling in Contemporary Nigerian Political Discourse. Communicatio 48:2 ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Saz-Rubio, Ma Milagros del
2023. Assessing impoliteness-related language in response to a season's greeting posted by the Spanish and English Prime Ministers on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics 206 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.