چکیده (انگلیسی):

Media Debate is an evolving pattern of political discourse in Nigeria that deserves being studied inorder to
address the discursive and pragmatic strategies of language indexing it. This is capable of revealing the
motivations of the stances expressed by participants, thus providing clearer insights into their positions on
issues. Existing works have hitherto concentrated on campaign speeches and interviews of individual
candidates to the neglect of competitive encounters. This is a gap this study attempts to fill. The study adopts
a combination of Brown and Levinson (1987) politeness and facework, Watts’ (2003, 2005) relational work
and frame theory. The final session of the Ondo State governorship election media debate of 2012 involving
the three major political parties formed the bulk of the data. The data was electronically recorded and
transcribed into the written mode for analysis. Two types of verbal behaviour (polite and impolite),projected
by three context-driven politeness strategies (persuasive, offensive and defensive), marked contestants’
utterances. While persuasive politeness strategy (exemplified by promising and testimonial argument)projects
polite verbal behaviour, offensive and defensive politeness strategies (deployed by contestants to categorise
and construct one another as corrupt, inept, incompetent, unfit, dishonest, deceitful) project impolite verbal
behaviour.