(Im)politeness and face management

a bakhtinian analysis of conflictual situations in the podcast discursive genre

Abstract

The popularization of podcasts in the contemporary digital environment has expanded the spaces for public debate and, along with them, the occurrences of conflictual interactions marked by ideological disputes and discursive confrontations. In this context, linguistic (im)politeness emerges as a relevant phenomenon for understanding the ways in which subjects construct and negotiate their social identities in verbal interaction. Thus, in this article, we aim to analyze how linguistic-discursive resources contribute to the construction of meaning, the negotiation of face, and the updating of ideological positions in a podcast episode, investigating how (im)politeness operates at the level of discourse and functions as a constitutive dimension of the utterance, rather than as a mere pragmatic accessory. This study articulates the dialogic framework of Bakhtin (2011) and Volóchinov (2025 [1929]) with the interactional and discursive perspectives on (im)politeness proposed by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004; 2006; 2010), Culpeper (2011), and Culpeper and Hardaker (2017). We adopt a qualitative approach, analyzing transcribed excerpts from the corpus, with transcriptions carried out in accordance with Marcuschi’s (2003) conventions. The analyses reveal that subjects mobilize a range of face-threatening and face-protecting resources — such as insults, irony, and derogatory vocatives — confirming that (im)politeness is a dialogic, discursive, and ideological phenomenon.