(Im)politeness in Political Speeches in Nigeria: The Oshiomhole’s and Wike’s Speeches

The paper examined Oshiomhole’s and Wike’s speeches describing them as cases of image laundering, face threatening and battering instances. Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory was used to establish how both speakers’ used impoliteness, humour and exaggerated politeness to negotiate meaning in discourse exchange. The data for this study were the speeches of Adam Oshiomohle, former All Progressive Congress (APC) national chairman and Nyesom Wike, the People Democratic Party (PDP) governor of Rivers State delivered on 10th of December, 2019 at Shehu Musa Yar’ Adua Centre, Abuja on the occasion of the launching of the Big Interview by Eric Osagie. A descriptive method of analysis was employed to evaluate the collected data. And the findings showed that a direct face attack was prevalent in their different political speeches. Again, that the both speakers used humour and rhetorical questions to pave way for the audience to actively participate in the discourse exchange. Finally, that the second speaker constructed meaning from the discursive metaphors created by the first speaker