Forms of address and socio-discursive roles in television political debates in Portugal: 1975-2022

Abstract

Forms of address (FA) are a pragmatic category that relates language and society. Its uses change with social changes, approximation, and resizing of the various strata in a non-specular relationship. They depend on the discursive genres in which they are used and on the relationships between interlocutors and their respective discursive roles, which they help to construct. The theoretical-methodological framework is discursive and pragmatic, which is why we considered the central notions of discourse genre and context. We start by synthesizing research on the FA system in European Portuguese, considering Cintra’s (1972) categories: pronominal, nominal, and verbal FA. We frame the reflection on FA as “relationèmes” (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1992) in the genre of television political debate as discourse in interaction. These are central discursive events that convene politics and social communication, in which FA has a core role. We aim at describing and explaining how, in this discursive genre and from a diachronic perspective, the socio-discursive roles of the interlocutors and the interactional organization condition the use of FA. The corpus consists of six debates between 1975 and 2022. The results show changes in the use, especially of nominal FAs, in those almost 50 years, with more proximity and informality in the present and greater distance and deference in debates at the beginning of democracy. The differences are noticeable in the FA used by journalist-moderators about the politicians present. The pragmatic effects of using delocution by alocution, which is common among politicians participating in debates, are also analyzed.