POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH PARLIAMENTARY SETTINGS
POLITENESS STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH PARLIAMENTARY SETTINGS

Summary/Abstract: As Escandell-Vidal (1996) points out, there have been important changes in the way language use has been studied. For several years, politeness mechanisms have been considered to be universal but investigations carried out on different cultures have revealed that this is not the case. There is a great amount of variation across cultures 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 does impinge on its language. To this purpose, I have restricted my study to a particular social setting and then I have contrasted the results in two different languages. In fact, I will analyse the specific linguistic strategies used by English 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 very specific rules of behaviour and so it could show important differences and/or similarities between these two cultures with regard to: (a) what values are selected in order to formalise these rules of behaviour; (b) how politicians depart from or adhere to these rules; and (c) how is language manipulated in order to achieve some political ends. And secondly because as Wilson puts it “... politicians’ language does not merely convey the message, but creates for the listener a controlled cognitive environment from which any interpretation is manipulated” (1991, p. 11).

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