Political discourse in the media: the positive face-work of President Barack Obama

• Autor(a) principal: Burgo, Vanessa Hagemeyer
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Silva Neto, João Vieira da
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Domínios de Lingu@gem
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/33050
• topic: Discurso Político; Interação Verbal; Face Positiva; Political Discourse; Verbal Interaction; Positive Face

The aim of this study is to analyze the positive face-work employed by the President of the United States Barack Obama during a verbal interaction. We intend to discuss the strategies used by him to reduce the illocutionary force of his utterances in order to mitigate or distance his image from polemical issues. The theoretical framework is based on the principles of Conversation Analysis and the corpus is composed of an interview given to David Letterman on his late-night talk show Late Show with David Letterman, broadcast by the American television network CBS in 2009. According to the findings, these devices influence the linguistic attitude of the President, especially when directly exposed to a great audience. His speech consists of socio-interactional strategies that contribute to reduce potential threats to the image that he wants to preserve in order to get listeners’ approval as well as to protect what he does not desire to be displayed.