Politeness Strategies in English and Spanish Parliamentary Settings

Abstract

As Escandell-Vidal (1996) points out, there have been important changes in the way language use has beenstudied. For several years, politeness mechanisms have been considered to be universal but investigations carriedout on different cultures have revealed that this is not the case. There is a great amount of variation acrosscultures not only in the linguistic forms but also in the strategies they use in verbal interaction.Facing this change, my aim here is to show to what extent the specific behaviour of a specific culture doesimpinge on its language. To this purpose, I have restricted my study to a particular social setting and then I havecontrasted the results in two different languages. In fact, I will analyse the specific linguistic strategies used byEnglish and Spanish politicians in Parliament.I have chosen this setting for two reasons. First of all because this is a social event which is controlled by veryspecific rules of behaviour and so it could show important differences and/or similarities between these twocultures with regard to: (a) what values are selected in order to formalise these rules of behaviour; (b) howpoliticians depart from or adhere to these rules; and (c) how is language manipulated in order to achieve somepolitical ends. And secondly because as Wilson puts it “... politicians’ language does not merely convey themessage, but creates for the listener a controlled cognitive environment from which any interpretation is manipu-lated” (1991, p. 11).Finally, I hope this paper offers some empirical evidence about the universality or specificity of some polite-ness mechanisms