<![CDATA[Conventional politeness theory assumes face-work occurs between interactants of comparable standing — an assumption that breaks down when one speaker holds institutional authority over the other. This study aims to examine how impoliteness functions as a resource for exercising such institutional power, using the 7 November 2018 White House press conference confrontation between then-President Donald Trump and CNN correspondent Jim Acosta as a single case. Verbal and nonverbal data were analysed using a qualitative sociopragmatic design pairing Culpeper’s impoliteness typology with Bourdieu’s, Foucault’s, and Fairclough’s perspectives on power; transcripts were cross-verified across eight media outlets as one dataset, with coding operating at the lingual unit nested within each speaker’s turn. The asymmetry was pronounced: impoliteness appeared in 80% of Trump’s coded utterances against 20% of Acosta’s, Trump’s concentrated in Bald On-Record and Positive Impoliteness, Acosta’s in Negative Impoliteness and Withhold Politeness. Power-relation coding showed the interaction dominated by Dominance (40%) and Hegemony (28%), with Resistance (24%) and Power Negotiation (8%) far less prominent. Rather than reading this as interactional breakdown, the study reframes impoliteness as a resource for asserting and converting institutional authority, extending Brown and Levinson’s fixed-cost assumption of face-threat by building structural power asymmetry into the model, and proposes a preliminary power-sensitive account of face-work.]]>
