Saving Face in Politics : An Analysis of Justin Trudeau’s Interviews

Abstract

This thesis examines the usage of positive and negative politeness strategies in two contextually different news interviews of Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, where one interview forced Trudeau to justify future political goals and actions, while the other required him to defend decisions made in the past. The aim of the study was to determine what the main positive and negative politeness strategies Trudeau used in the interviews were and how his use of the strategies differed in the interviews based on the context. The main background research for the study comes from Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory where they define positive politeness strategies as 15 different linguistic ways of showing, for example, common ground and approval, while negative politeness strategies are defined as 10 ways of giving one freedom of action and minimising imposition. These strategies protect the positive and negative faces of the politician which, in this study, refer to their want to be approved of as well as their want to have autonomy. The study also further notes that a politician’s face extends beyond their own to include the faces of their party and affiliates.

Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the interviews in this study. The data consisted of 18 question-answer pairs from two official news interview videos, so, nine pairs from each interview, which were transcribed into text. Questions focused mainly on the well-being and financial stability of Canadians with one interview focused on future goals and the other one on past decisions on the matter. The instances of positive and negative politeness strategies were noted down and the politeness strategies with the highest number of instances across answers were determined as the most used strategies.

The findings of the study suggest that, in both interviews, Trudeau used mainly positive politeness strategies and employed a wide range of them instead of just relying on a couple specific ones. When it came to negative politeness strategies in the interviews, however, Trudeau was more limited in his usage, especially in terms of range. A deeper comparison of the interviews showed that while Trudeau was concentrated on using positive politeness strategies that emphasised common ground in both interviews, he tended to use positive politeness strategies that took notice of the addressee more in the future-focused interview than the past-focused one. Trudeau having to justify future actions also seemed to make him use negative politeness strategies more than when he needed to defend past actions. In conclusion, the study shows that needing to defend future or past political actions seems to have an effect on the politeness strategies a politician might use.