“Impoliteness Strategies In Joe Biden’s Speech”

Abstract

Based on Jonathan Culpeper's (1996) concept of impoliteness, this study examined one of the pragmatic forms of impoliteness that occurred in President Biden's speeches during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The purpose of the study is to determine the various impoliteness tactics that Biden employs, as well as the most frequently used strategies of impoliteness. The study was based on three press conferences of President Biden. These conferences took place on August 16, 20, and 22 of 2021. The data was collected from impolite utterances in Biden's speech, which were heard and seen in videos on YouTube and read from a written transcript on the White House's official website. In this study, a descriptive qualitative approach was used for deep clarification of the data. The topic of investigation was the phenomena of impoliteness strategies in verbal communication or spoken language. The results revealed that there were five strategies of impoliteness that occurred in Biden’s speeches, and the most common one was positive impoliteness. In addition, the investigation shows that Biden exaggerated his power to attack the hearer.