Políticos cara a cara : actividades de imagen en el debate electoral

POLITICIANS FACE TO FACE: FACE WORK IN THE ELECTORAL DEBATE. Linguistic politeness is a collection of verbal strategies of the other’s face protection and apprasail that regulates interpesonal relation and comunication (Brown and Levinson 1987). However, there are some discourse genres where the speaker is threatened since they focus on disagreement and impoliteness turns into the objective of conversation (Blas Arroyo, 2001). Furthermore, this concept of face is not universal, but it changes and upgrades in accordante with the sociocultural context and with the roles that speakers adopt in the interaction (Bravo, 2003). In the electoral debate, for example, the opponents want to mutally ruin each other in order to reinforce their face. All this occurs in television and so the attack to the opponent turns into a mediatic show. In this paper, we will study the two face to face debate between Zapatero and Rajoy in 2008, within the context of Spanish general elections. We will analyze face work used in the confrontation to evaluate if candidates prefer to discredit the opponent or to empazyse with their political programs.