Hacia una teoría pragmática de la respuesta evasiva en el discurso político francés y españolestudio comparativo-tipológico de entrevistas televisadas

Zusammenfassung

The idea that politicians tend to evasively answer questions that might compromise them in the public opinion represents, beyond something obvious to citizens, an object of high interest for linguistic and discursive analysis. However, not all cultures have paid the same attention to this fact. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the evasive response has been extensively studied, especially from a conversational approach. This has not been the case, however, in the French and Spanish contexts, despite the fact that the French school of Discourse Analysis has had political discourse as one of its preferred objects of study since its origin. The doctoral thesis that we present deals with the comparative study of the evasive response in French and Spanish political discourse in situations involving interaction. Framed within a theoretical-methodological perspective of Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis, the work analyzes a corpus of eight televised interviews whose protagonists are eight high-ranking government officials—four for each linguistic context—and, in the French case, includes a current head of state. These are, specifically, the last four presidents of the Spanish Government (José María Aznar, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez) and the last four presidents of the Fifth French Republic (Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron). The objective is to quantify their degree of evasiveness when dealing with controversial or sensitive issues that entail risks for their image, and to identify the most frequent mechanisms with which they evade responses. The discursive genre chosen to examine the object of study is the political interview, conducted by journalists, on television and live, with a maximum degree of face-to-face interaction and high public exposure for the participants. Along with the empirical results, our work provides its own theory, from a pragmatic perspective, to explain the evasive act in political discourse, accompanied by a series of original categories and units of analysis.