Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodological framework to analyze the dynamics of the positioning acts of political actors in dialogic forms of interaction, such as final TV debates for presidential elections, from the perspective of positioning theory. Positioning theory activates a tridimensional semiotic model, which includes positioning acts—semiotic configurations with a certain stability in the communicational practices of the community—Storyline and the implicit Illocutionary force of any discursive exchange. This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach—analysing the positioning complementarily with the Eudico Linguistic Annotator framework for Multimodality research—to capture on the one hand the dynamics of the discursive exchange in the episode we considered, and on the other hand to disambiguate the Positioning of the political actors involved in the debate.