Those who say that yes without saying yes. An approach to the mitigation and its resources in the discourse of Mexican politicians

Abstract

Mexican electoral laws and regulations contain a strange and curious disposition: no one can be proclaimed or presented as a candidate before the specified deadlines, whose date are those that the institutions in charge of organizing the elections established at the beginning of the electoral campaigns. The process includes the selection of candidates by legally recognized parties (or processes for selecting independent candidates). Before the stipulated date, whoever says that will be a candidate, is exposed to the denial of registration and thus the possibility of appearing in the election. In this paper we analyze the discourse in a variety of answers given by the virtual candidates to the expressed demands of people, the media or other institutions on whether they will be candidates. The period studied corresponds to the elections held in the State of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, in June 2015. We agree with Albelda (2005) in which it is necessary to distinguish atenuation from courtesy, but we propose that also have to delimit the attenuation of denial, ambiguity or vagueness. In the analysis of the examples for the cases mentioned, we believe that we must provide an appropiate approach to refer to this type of illocutionary acts (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2013) that are delimited by these phenomena.