Linguistic Politeness anchors the construction, maintenance and face preservation of the speakers, so that the monitoring of communicative event production is paramount in these processes. The objective of this study is to analyze the strategies of (im)politeness and face preservation in dialogues between doctors and patients characters from the television series House (2004-2012), paying attention to the fact that such strategies are part of the discursive construction of typical linguistic artifacts of this profession. As theoretical basis, it was used the studies of Brown and Levinson (1987), Goffman (1967) and Paiva (2008) regarding the concepts of positive and negative politeness and face preservation. Firstly, twelve episodes of the aforementioned series were chosen, the scripts were collected from the web and their transcription was checked with the audio. Afterwards, the dialogues that had interactions among patients and doctors were separated to assess how modal verbs could cooperate or not, in the process of politeness and preservation of image/face of their interlocutors. The cases analyzed showed that the physicians participating in Dr. House's team sought to preserve their face through the use of modal verbs, and the inclusion of their figures in the statements. As a mitigating factor of responsibility, or to decrease the illocutionary force of their speech acts, such professionals acted as source and target of their statements. Therefore, we can conclude that the use of such verbs enable the reduction of the weight of responsibility and threatening acts of face in social interactions represented by the series.
