Exploring Power and Politeness Schemes in Political Discourses: An Intercultural Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines politeness strategies in intercultural political discourse with a focus on how the politicians in different cultures use politeness and how they purposefully flout to attain their vexed targets. For examining the
cross-cultural traits three video interviews were selected that is, of Hillary Clinton, Mr. Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Hina Rabbani Khar on the basis  of diverse content and for the subjects of global importance. The data was manually transcribed following the Levinson and Brown (1987) model, and further Leech maxims of politeness (1983) were applied to explore flouting
in combination to Levinson and Brown (1987) concept of ‘face’ as a theoretical framework to analyze the flouting in conversation. The findings show that the politicians use politeness traits mostly as a mechanical tool for face saving, and to portray themselves as socially acceptable. The mostly appearing scheme was the use of hedging in the selected discourse, which portrays vagueness and ambiguity in exercising political power in an intercultural discourse. The analysis concludes that the intercultural
politeness is contrariwise to power control that is, higher the political power less will be the politeness observed.