IMPOLITENESS AND POWER RELATIONS OF THE CENTRE IN EDO STATE 2016 GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION DEBATE

Abstract

Language has power potentials to influence make or mar individuals and shape public opinions on the norms of life. This ascertains the relationship between language and politics as inseparable because language is an indispensable tool in politics. In this light, recently, studies on political discourse such as election debates have tended to be a description and analysis of style, innovative and persuasive strategies of politicians and manipulation of linguistic structures to champion individual interests in the discourse. There is a need to investigate how texts instantiate and sustain power relations by the politicians in election debates. This study therefore examines how power relation strategies are used during Edo State 2016 gubernatorial election debate under the theoretical framework of impoliteness by Brown and Levinson (1987). The analysis focuses on impoliteness linguistic structures to examine the utterances of politicians who are the centre and their pragmatic import in the debate. The analysis reveals that politicians used face attacks, accusation, condemnations, rudeness, aggression and so on in the debate to make their political ideologies known to the public and also undermine one another. This study can also illuminate and elicit further studies in this area of political discourse.