IMPOLITENESS AND FACE THREATENING ACTS IN THE U.S PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE BETWEEN DONALD TRUMP AND KAMALA HARRIS

Abstract

The paper examines a pragmatic analysis of impoliteness and Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs) in the high-stakes context of U.S. presidential debates. Focusing on the September 2024 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the paper adopted Culpeper’s (1996, 2011) framework of Impoliteness with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).  The paper selected twelve excerpts (12) to deconstruct how grammatical choices engineer pragmatic effects. The findings reveal that both candidates frequently engaged in face-threatening behavior, but with distinct stylistic patterns rooted in their grammatical choices. Donald Trump’s rhetoric was characterized by high-modality declarative clauses. In contrast, Kamala Harris predominantly employed Material and Causative Processes to cast Trump as the sole Actor responsible for national outcomes while her strategic use of Verbal Processes to report third-party criticism and the imperative mood functioned to perform a persona of moral and factual accountability. The study concludes that impoliteness in this context is a calculated, strategic tool, where the specific grammatical structures chosen by candidates are central to constructing political personas, delegitimizing opponents, and shaping the debate’s narrative for the voting public.