Television interviews

analysis of attenuation procedures in French and Portuguese

Abstract

By engaging in an interaction, the interactants must consider a number of linguistic rules, contextual and interactive, in order to ensure its full implementation. Although the conversational rules are culturally pre-defined, the various interactional situations create, inevitably, conflicts that may cause danger to the speaker and the interlocutor's public image. To preserve the image of both, to reduce or even avoid tensions in verbal interactions, verbal politeness strategies are put into practice, which can be defined as a social identity expressed in verbal behavior. The present work aims to study the functioning of some conversational mitigation procedures as a key strategy to achieve a harmonious verbal interaction. Thus, we analyzed television interviews conducted by speakers of French (France) and Portuguese (Brazil) in order to examine which negative politeness strategies are employed in each of these cultures in a confrontational situation. Based on the classification proposed by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1996, 2005) which has in Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) its main references, we sought to identify the differences and similarities of the mitigation procedures put into action in both languages.