OUR CENTRIFUGES ARE GOOD TO SPIN: AN ANALYSIS OF FACEWORK AND POLTENESS IN ROWHANI'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN

On the 14th of June, 2013 the international community witnessed a significant event taking place in Iran which was deemed by many to be a turning point during the past few years: the 11th presidential election of the Islamic Republic of Iran in which, contrary to the prediction of some domestic and foreign opposing groups that had either called for a boycott of the election or predicted a low level of participation in it on the part of the voters, the voter turnout was 72.7%. The outcome of the election showed that Hassan Rowhani, the popular moderate cleric, had polled over 50.7% of 36.7 million votes cast. The present study investigates the politeness strategies and facewok employed by Rowhani during his election campaign. The data were gathered from Rowhani's speeches delivered in various cities in Iran, from his promotional video which, along with those of the other candidates, was broadcast on the Iranian state TV and his interviews on TV prior to the election. The data were then analyzed based on the notion of 'face' and facework as proposed by Goffman and on the concept of 'politeness' as put forward by Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness. The analysis of Rowhani's speeches demonstrated that he avoided direct reference to and criticism of the political strategies and foreign policies adopted by the Ahmadinejad administration, thus employing negative politeness. For instance, Rowhani used the pronoun 'they' or the phrase 'those who...' to achieve this aim. Rowhani also made frequent indirect and vague, but decidable on the basis of contextual, visual factors, allusions to some of the past leading figures of the Islamic Republic and their achievements and therefore utilized off-record politeness strategies in his first promotional video. Rowhani's frequent use of the pronoun 'we' and the verbs associated with it in the presidential debates, in reference to the policy pursued during his office in charge of the nuclear negotiator team, and his claiming a common point of view with the interviewer shows that positive politeness, intended to express and foster solidarity rather than power, appealed to the president-elect as well. The mixed use of various politeness strategies and his clever avoidance of direct encounter with his serious rivals revealed the Glasgow Caledonian University graduate's mastery over the political rhetoric.

کلیدواژه ها:

Facework ، Intertextuality ، Politeness Theory ، Presidential Election