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Abstract
This study looks to examine and describe the role of politeness in televised political interviews in Peru. Under the theoretical framework developed by Brown and Levinson (1987), politeness has been described as a tool for mitigating the Face Threatening Acts (or FTAs) present in combative conversations. This thesis intends to show that linguistic politeness is expressed in a number of ways in televised political interviews that are not accounted for by the Brown and Levinson model. In these interviews, the participants are not concerned with preserving either their own face or that of their interlocutors. This avoidance of FTAs is a result of the desire to maintain an amicable conversational atmosphere, one in which the image of the interlocutors projected to the television audience is carefully controlled. This study analyses ten interviews from two different political interview programs on Peruvian television. The objective is to provide a comparison of the similarities and differences between these two types of programs, which differ in the type of linguistic approach assumed in the interview situation.