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It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research
Edited by Bettina Kluge and María Irene Moyna
[Topics in Address Research 1] 2019
► pp. 305–332

Pragmatic and grammatical categories for the analysis of forms of address in presidential election debates

This chapter presents grammatical and pragmatic criteria for the linguistic description of forms of address in televised presidential election debates, considered as a sub-genre of political discourse. It argues that a detailed linguistic description of the data is necessary before embarking on the interpretive phase of the strategic use of forms of address in this type of verbal interaction. The linguistic criteria proposed are (1) grammatical: parts of speech categories for forms of address, syntactic function, and word order; and (2) pragmatic: debate format, turn position, participant roles, discursive acts exhibiting forms of address, the appellative function of forms of address, and reference. These criteria are applied to Spanish language data taken from the televised 1994 and 2012 Mexican presidential election debates.

Keywords: forms of address, social deixis, appellative function, Mexican Spanish, televised presidential election debates, descriptive linguistics methodology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology, data, and the polyfunctionality of forms of address in political discourse
  • 3.Grammatical and syntactic categories of forms of address
    • 3.1Grammatical categories
    • 3.2Syntactic function and word order of forms of address
  • 4.Pragmatic categories
    • 4.1Debate format
    • 4.2Position in the turn where address items occur
    • 4.3Participant roles
    • 4.4Appellative function
    • 4.5Discursive acts where forms of address occur
    • 4.6Reference
  • 5.Data on forms of address in two Mexican televised presidential election debates
    • 5.1Forms of address by grammatical category and syntactic function
    • 5.2Forms of address by appellative function and addresser
    • 5.3Forms of address by sections of the debate and discursive act
  • 6.Discussion: Assessing the applicability of grammatical and pragmatic criteria
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.1.12las
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