Cortesía y poder: Un acercamiento socio-semiótico

Abstract

Politeness and power appear, in our everyday life, from the semantic and semi otic point of view, as notional fields pertaining to two differen t universes of sense. In this study we establish modalities of social practices in which t hese two thematic isotopies are correlated because, at first sight, we consider politeness as implyin g a formality of communicative interaction which is oriented to the cession of pow er. In the biological sense of the term, power can be apprehended as a manifestation of brut e force, while the notion of politeness appears in our imaginary as related to soc ial rituals of manipulation: it is that of the gentleman taking his hat off in order to greet a la dy or covering a puddle with his coat so that she may pass without getting wet; this small s cene of everyday life reflects the existence of pre-established mo dal roles: the gentleman, figure of power, who bows before the lady, figure of seduction. Our exploratory stud y leads us to an approximation of the semiotic relation between those two significant con figurations; for this purpose we examine some mitigation strategies. Our examples are taken from Venezuelan sociolinguistic materials, Dominguez and Mora (1998). 1. Poder y lenguaje