This article examines impoliteness in political TV debates in Lithuania. Study adopts qualitative and quantitative content analysis method to analyze 720 minutes of political debates broadcasted before the 2016 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections. Current paper presents theoretical approach to impoliteness, which is later used in empirical analysis to address 2 main objectives: a) to study impoliteness in terms of directness/indirectness and b) to reveal how face threatening acts (FTAs) are expressed. The results of the study have revealed that impoliteness during political TV debates is almost equally expressed directly and indirectly. Direct impoliteness during political debates can be expressed using all functional types of the sentences. Indirect impoliteness in debates can be modified internally and externally using various language resources: inclusive we form, official addressing words, irony, parantheses. This suggests that impoliteness in the context of political TV debates is a unique phenomenon specified by various creative ways of using the language in order to publicly belittle political opponents.

The paper aims to reveal the process of face and power construction in the context of political TV debates in Lithuania and to analyse face threatening acts (FTAs) in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. This study adopts the qualitative content analysis approach to analyse 360 minutes of political debates broadcasted before the 2016 Lithuanian parliamentary elections. The current paper presents the concept of impoliteness, which is later applied in the empirical analysis to address two main objectives: (a) to analyse the process of face and power construction in political TV debates and (b) to study FTAs in terms of propositional content and orientation to the addressee’s face. The results of the study have revealed that politicians seek to get more power by producing FTAs towards their opponents; a zero-sum game metaphor can be used to describe this process. Also, the analysis of FTAs has demonstrated that politicians tend to apply both negative and positive impoliteness strategies. The analysis of FTAs in terms of propositional content has shown that politicians are mostly described as the ones who are lying, hiding the truth, and have performed wrong and ineffective actions in the past. This suggests that participants in Lithuanian political TV debates seek to damage their rival’s face in a way which does not harm their own face by applying indirect – positive and negative – impoliteness strategies and by negatively describing their opponents’ professionalism and general competencies.

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Linguistic Impoliteness in Political TV Debates