Edited by Bettina Kluge and María Irene Moyna
[Topics in Address Research 1] 2019
► pp. 305–332
This chapter presents grammatical and pragmatic criteria for the linguistic description of forms of address in televised presidential election debates, considered as a sub-genre of political discourse. It argues that a detailed linguistic description of the data is necessary before embarking on the interpretive phase of the strategic use of forms of address in this type of verbal interaction. The linguistic criteria proposed are (1) grammatical: parts of speech categories for forms of address, syntactic function, and word order; and (2) pragmatic: debate format, turn position, participant roles, discursive acts exhibiting forms of address, the appellative function of forms of address, and reference. These criteria are applied to Spanish language data taken from the televised 1994 and 2012 Mexican presidential election debates.