Impoliteness as face attack (Based on American presidential debates of 2020)

Against the backdrop of such communicative trends as ludification and emotionalization, political communication is more susceptible to the speakers’ use of impoliteness. The article aims to describe impoliteness and adjacent phenomena including discreditation and speech aggression in political discourse. Despite the fact that impoliteness is ultimately perceived as such only on the subjective, or personal level, it is possible to describe it in scientific https://doi.org/10.22250/2410719020241035 categories by using the idea of face originating from Oriental cultures and explicated by Western linguists. Face is the way people perceive themselves that according to J. Culpeper, consists of (i) the person’s positive features (quality face); (ii) favorable views of the social group which the individual belongs to (social identity face); (iii) relationships with others, formed within a particular team (relational face). More than 400 impolite contexts found in the discourse of 2020 American presidential debates were selected to be the material for this study. The material was processed using critical discourse analysis, linguopragmatic analysis, linguopolitical interpretation, contextual and linguosemantic analysis, quantitative method. It was found out that in political discourse, the quality face attack was the most common. This is explained by the need to question the rationality of the opponent’s actions, views and ideologies lurking behind them. Implicit speech aggression was widely used and impoliteness was sometimes alternated with politeness. On the other hand, it was rare in the process of struggle between irreconcilable political platforms. In such cases, speakers were more likely to attack social identity face or even relational face.