Attenuation and intensification in politicians’ speeches: a study by historical pragmatics

Abstract

Given that candidates for political office need to win votes, they must pay attention to the language choices they make to discursively construct their images before society. This article proposes, therefore, an analysis and comparison of attenuated and intensified linguistic manifestations applied as a tactic to persuade the voting public during interviews granted to the Roda Viva television program before the 1989 and 2018 elections, based on the precept that there were changes in the use of language in different temporal circumscriptions. In order to carry out this research, we adopted as main theoretical foundation the assumptions about image constitution phenomena within an interactionist perspective, understood as social activities, according to Bravo (1999, 2002), Hernández Flores (2004, 2005), Albelda (2004) and Briz (1998, 2002, 2007, 2012). The work was built from a pragmatic analysis, in which excerpts from television videos of the interviews constitute the corpus. We must consider, after all, that the interview genre is a sometimes controversial interaction, especially within the political discourse, in which one must maintain a self-image in order to win votes by approaching his potential voters.