Political face: a study of politeness marks in president Bolsonaro's posts

Political discourse is a propitious field for the development of discursive strategies with a view to obtaining symbolic power. Thus, so called by Charaudeau (2006), politics is a game of masks for the constitution of socially approved images. In this context, we understand linguistic politeness as a discursive resource for the construction of discourse and socio-ideologically oriented representations for the installation and legitimation of party -political projects. In this perspective, this article intends to investigate how linguistic politeness is articulated in the speeches of President Jair Bolsonaro for the construction of a political face. For this, we will focus on the studies of linguistic politeness by the pragmaticists Brown and Levinson (1978; 1987), regarding the conception of discourse, we adopt Norman Fairclough's (2016) Critical Discourse Analysis Theory (CDA). Using a qualitative research methodology, we guided, also, by the method of analysis in social networks, the ARS, this way, we chose as corpus of analysis, 3 posts from the official profile of President Bolsonaro in the social network Twitter. The results found showed that the politeness strategies recurrent in the analyzed speeches are of the d type, used to claim a nationalist face, leading to an ultra -conservative position, in addition to the use of discursive strategies as a way of legitimizing intolerant speeches.