Address forms in Mexican political-presidential interviews

Abstract

Based on previous studies (Cuenca, 2013; Cuenca & Marín, 2015), we will analyze the use of some second-person appeal forms (vocatives, forms of address, and pronominal forms as subjects) as an index of transgressive and courteous / discourteous strategies impacting the construction of discursive images of speakers. The objective is to establish whether the results provide data to better understand the presidential political interview genre in Mexico. The results reveal that the studied forms can indeed function as markers of such transgressions, reflecting the power struggle within this discursive device, impacting the degree of genre transgression and constituting one of the linguistic manifestations through which the construction of the political adversary can be analyzed on the interactional level. Our observations suggest that strategies in the use of second-person appeal forms show distinct patterns in the construction of the adversary, correlated with the presidential models represented by the interviewees. Therefore, their analysis may also contribute to understanding the behavior of this genre in Mexican political discourse.