“Respectful greeting. Thanks you for your interest.” Linguistic politeness as a strategy in relationships between conflicting speakers

Abstract

In this paper we study the linguistic politeness in an epistolary interaction in which participants have opposing ideological positions. Specifically, we analyze the strategies of politeness in complaints of human rights violations in Colombia, sent by the Italian Network of Solidarity with the peace communities of Colombia, and the answers provided by the Colombian government. The analysis covers the first presidential term of Alvaro Uribe Velez (2002 – 2006), which increased complaints of violation of human rights of civilians, due to the repressive nature of the government and its security policy with which it increased military action as a means of social control, arguing as a backdrop the fight against drug traffic and guerrillas. Allegations make visible, mainly military actions against civilians and collusion between Government forces and paramilitaries (extreme right groups). Inductive methodology is applied in the socio- cognitive discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2003), in which we analyze different discursive levels in the whole of a wider investigation. In this article we focus only on the analysis of politeness in pragmatic perspective, following the theoretical proposal of Brown and Levinson (1987). The analysis showed that, in the Government’s letters, linguistic politeness used strategically to avoid giving explanations about facts that Network denounces; while by the latter, politeness is used to compensate discursively the intrusion of an international organization in matters pertaining to the internal dynamics of a country.