Impoliteness and Thematic Variation in Spanish Television Interviews

Abstract

This paper analyses Spanish television interviews and presents a contrast between the impolite argumentative strategies employed by the interviewer to attack the image of the interviewee in interviews with politicians and celebrities. It aims to demonstrate how the topic addressed and the subtype of interview influence the strategies employed and degree of impoliteness shown by the interviewer. The analysis of our corpus has shown that the current television interview differs from the traditional format of this genre in a number of respects. Impoliteness is used in Spanish interviews in order to attract the audience and to build the journalist’s face in political interviews as participants in ideological confrontation. Nevertheless, the detailed study of the impoliteness strategies employed by the interviewer has shown that the modification of features largely depends on the subtype examined. We observed in television celebrity interviews a wider range of strategies of verbal impoliteness, which are absent from political interviews. This explains why a variationist perspective has been adopted in the analysis of verbal impoliteness.