Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2014
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan, London
Abstract
Linguistic politeness plays an important role in the opinions people form of one another, especially when it offers one of the few clues an individual may have of his or her interlocutor’s disposition, as is the case in anonymous, first-time service encounters. Face is a fundamental concept in politeness theory. To borrow a summary from Callahan (2011):
Positive face refers to the desire to be liked and appreciated, while negative face refers to the desire to be unimpeded (Brown and Levinson 1987). Positive and negative face are often characterized as corresponding to the dichotomies of involvement vs. independ- ence, intimacy vs. distance, and solidarity vs. deference (Scollon and Scollon 2001). An action or utterance that goes against one’s need for appreciation, in the case of positive face, or autonomy, in the case of negative face, is said to constitute a face-threatening act, or FTA (Brown and Levinson 1987). [...] Speech acts as well as non-linguistic actions that attend to the addressee’s as well as the speaker’s own face, both positive and negative, are described as face work.1 Face work attenuates, or mitigates, the force of face-threatening acts. (28)
Chapter of
Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders: Studies in Honor of Milton M. Azevedo
Editor
Laura Callahan
Recommended Citation
Callahan, L. (2014). Face Work in Spanish Language Service Encounters between Native and Nonnative Speakers in the United States. In L. Callahan (Ed.), Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders: Studies in Honor of Milton M. Azevedo (pp. 215–235). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340450_14
Comments
This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340450_14.
Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.