Languages & Linguistics
Concept of Face
The concept of "face" in sociolinguistics refers to the public image or social identity that individuals maintain in interactions. It involves the desire to be respected and valued by others, and the strategies used to uphold this image. Face-saving and face-threatening acts are central to this concept, influencing communication and social dynamics.
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7 Key excerpts on "Concept of Face"
eBook - PDF- F. Bargiela-Chiappini, D. Kádár, F. Bargiela-Chiappini, D. Kádár(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
To this end, I follow an empirical first-order perspective and try to tease out lay people’s understanding of the concept on the basis of ‘face’ expressions. It is argued that concerning its everyday use, it makes sense to talk about face both as an individual’s possession (with group repercussions) and as a pre-existing (though not static) entity. This seems to be in accord with earlier approaches (e.g. Goffman 1972) but rather discordant with current theorising, which sees face as discursively co-constructed in interaction. There is no doubt that in social interaction there is negotia- tion of face, which, however, is based on the qualities assumed to be included in each other’s face. In other words, what is argued here is that rather than being attributed anew in every interaction, interlocutors On the Concept of Face and Politeness 43 mostly maintain but may also modify each other’s and their own face. Moreover, modification may be the result of more than one encounter. 2. Theoretical background Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) theory of politeness has been extremely influential: based on speech act theory and Grice’s theory of conversation, it has been extensively criticised for focusing on single acts rather than longer chunks of discourse. Its other source, Goffman’s notion of ‘face’, has been identified as an essential component of inter- action but in need of expansion and elaboration to include Goffman’s broader conceptualisation. For Goffman (1972: 319), “face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular interaction. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes – albeit an image that others may share”.
eBook - PDFDeveloping Contrastive Pragmatics
Interlanguage and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
- Martin Pütz, JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer, Martin Pütz, JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself. -image. His approach therefore allows speakers an active role in proposing a certain self-image; whether this self-image is accepted by others is a differ-ent question. Furthermore, his definition of face also implies that the self-images speakers try to convey are related to social roles. This supports a social construct. Face is how speakers want to be seen (self-image) and how 134 Doris Dippold they are seen by others, linked to the social roles foregrounded in an encoun-ter (image). Identity, i.e. what kind of person one is, is therefore co-constructed by both speakers through interaction. A further important concept Goffman introduces in his essay on facework is the concept of line. Lines are again within a dual approach defined as e-thing speakers actively bring forward: In each of these contacts, he tends to act out what is sometimes called a line that is, a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, l-lowed to prevail, and each participant is allowed to carry off the role he appear Lines have been defined in various ways in the research literature, although many theorists choose not mention the concept at all. For instance, for Watts (2003) lines are part of the politic (expected) behaviour associated with a certain discourse activity, while Bargiela-Chiappini (2003) sees in them The term, however, goes quite clearly beyond just standing for speak perceptions. Goffman makes it clear that lines are actual verbal acts by which a speaker represents his overall view of the situation and the interac-tants, to which is linked the array of goals that a speaker may pursue in a s ideas heard).
eBook - PDF- Michael Haugh, Dániel Z. Kádár, Marina Terkourafi(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
However, we are in agreement with Bargiela-Chiappini (2009: 315) who contends that we should perhaps concentrate more on what emic concepts of face share, and on their common underlying norms and values (e.g. shame, honour, defer- ence). In earlier research (Sifianou 2011, 2016), we suggested that the Concept of Face in Greek seems to share features with the Japanese, Chinese and Korean concepts. For instance, much like these languages, Greek has more than one term for ‘face’ with overlapping functions, and a range of expressions involving the term ‘face’. Much as in East Asian languages, the verbs used in related collocations are those also used for possessions (e.g. have, fall down, drop). As in East Asian languages, face is also conceptualized as a collective possession, since a group such as a family may lose face due to wrongdoings by one of its members (see also Ervin- Tripp et al. 1995). In their comparative study, Ruhi and Kádár (2011) find noteworthy similarities between Chinese and Turkish. It has been argued that exploring the details of the development of actual interactions will enable us to make sense of how participants themselves understand face. Haugh (2012) espouses a conversation analytic approach which will also include ethnographic information and broader sociological perspectives (see also Arundale 2010; Haugh and Watanabe 2009). This clarification is significant because it will be difficult, for instance, to decode the full meaning of a response without relevant detailed information on the interlocutors’ relational history. In this connection, it should be noted that work on face appears to have concentrated on passing encounters and has sidestepped issues involved in long-term relationships where some form of face pre-exists having been established in the multitude of prior inter- actions.
eBook - PDFExplorations in Pragmatics
Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects
- Istvan Kecskes, Laurence R. Horn(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
These authors and other politeness pioneers have gone on to suggest that social (indeed, politeness) considerations motivate departures from the CP, setting the tone for numerous cross-cultural descriptions of conversational behavior which view the CP as an underlying principle that is ‘maintained in the breach’ – i.e., hardly ever openly adhered to, thereby enabling all sorts of additional messages to be communicated implicitly. However, the path of incorporating social considerations into the CP – rather than viewing them as post facto reasons for deviating from it – has remained relatively unexplored. My aim in this chapter has been to explore this path, by proposing to view the CP as not primary, but rather further reducible to the premises of interlocutors’ rationality and face (section 2). Tracing the genealogy of face back to its Asian roots, I argued that the scientific term found in anthropological linguistic writings is irredeemably colored by the Western folk term, raising serious doubts as to its universality (section 3). In its place, I proposed a second-order notion of face, or Face2, which is biologically grounded in the basic emotional dimension of approach/withdrawal, and intentionality (section 4). Its biological grounding makes Face2 universal, while its intentionality makes it uniquely human and irreducibly relational. Different first-order conceptualizations of face, or Face1, instantiate Face2 in particular cultural and situational circumstances. Placing such a definition of face at the basis of conversational behavior generates the full range of possibilities from overly co-operative behavior to non-cooperation and even openly conflictual behavior (section 6). In all these instances, interlocutors aim to constitute their own faces, which leads them to enhance or threaten Other’s face. Mutual awareness of face
- Jenny Arendholz(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- John Benjamins Publishing Company(Publisher)
Although both authors acknowledge that face is a culture-sensitive notion whose content will be subject to “cultural elaboration” (1987: 13), they still assume that “the mutual knowledge of members’ public self-image or face, and the social necessity to orient oneself to it in interaction, are universal” (Brown/Levinson 1987: 61f.). Despite this claim to universality, the picture Brown/ Levinson have drawn of face still exhibits a Western ethnocentric orientation. As to the nature of face, they add the following refections: Tus face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, main-tained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction. In gen-eral, people cooperate (and assume each other’s cooperation) in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being based on the mutual vulnerability of face. Tat is, normally everyone’s face depends on everyone else’s being maintained, and since people can be expected to defend their faces if threatened, and in defending their own to threaten others’ faces, it is in general in every participant’s best interest to maintain each other’s face […]. (Brown/Levinson 1987: 61) 60 (In)Appropriate Online Behavior Based on this defnition of face, Brown/Levinson distinguish two separate types of face. 29 Note, however, that the choice of terms is rather unfortunate since posi-tive and negative are not meant to be evaluative terms for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as one’s intuition might suggest but as two opposite poles on a scale: negative face : “the want of every ‘competent adult member’ that his action be unimpeded by others” (1987: 62) or “his want to have his freedom of action un-hindered and his attention unimpeded” (1987: 129). positiveface : “the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others” (1987: 62) or “his perennial desire that his wants (or the actions/acquisi-tions/values resulting from them) should be thought of as desirable” (1987: 101).
- Thomas R. Williams(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This statement of the goal thus simply points to an interesting observable phenomenon, that people communicate, and proposes to achieve a scientific understanding of it. The scope of this goal should be approximately, if not exactly, the same as the observational scope of broad linguistics. I have called the discipline answering to this goal HUMAN LINGUISTICS. This is to eliminate any confusion with the traditional linguistics of language but at the same time to recognize that the interests of lin-guists today probably come closer to this goal than the interests of any other current sizable group of scholars, and, furthermore, lin-guistics has probably already given us more insights into this area than any other discipline. Human Linguistics and Face-to-Face Interaction 321 THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF HUMAN LINGUISTICS It is a great advantage of our new goal that we can start with people. An appropriate scientific concept of people for the purposes of human linguistics should not be difficult to formulate, for people are objects that are given in advance and that can be considered from different viewpoints: there are several other sciences that study people. Since a person is a real physical object that can be known from points of view other than human linguistics, the concept of person does not suffer from the difficulties associated with the concept of language or the concept of communication. Of course, we are not interested in studying every aspect of people, but only those aspects that are related to how they communicate. It is thus appropriate that we set up as our first concept in human linguis-tics an abstraction that includes just those properties of people that are of interest. We define the COMMUNICATING INDIVIDUAL as an abstrac-tion in linguistics that includes just those properties of the person that are required to account for his communicative behavior.
- Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, Mary R. Key, Adam Kendon, Richard M. Harris, Mary R. Key(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This statement of the goal thus simply points to an interesting observable phenomenon, that people communicate, and proposes to achieve a scientific understanding of it. The scope of this goal should be approximately, if not exactly, the same as the observational scope of broad linguistics. I have called the discipline answering to this goal HUMAN LINGUISTICS. This is to eliminate any confusion with the traditional linguistics of language but at the same time to recognize that the interests of lin-guists today probably come closer to this goal than the interests of any other current sizable group of scholars, and, furthermore, lin-guistics has probably already given us more insights into this area than any other discipline. Human Linguistics and Face-to-Face Interaction 55 THE BASIC CONCEPTS OF HUMAN LINGUISTICS It is a great advantage of our new goal that we can start with people. An appropriate scientific concept of people for the purposes of human linguistics should not be difficult to formulate, for people are objects that are given in advance and that can be considered from different viewpoints: there are several other sciences that study people. Since a person is a real physical object that can be known from points of view other than human linguistics, the concept of person does not suffer from the difficulties associated with the concept of language or the concept of communication. Of course, we are not interested in studying every aspect of people, but only those aspects that are related to how they communicate. It is thus appropriate that we set up as our first concept in human linguis-tics an abstraction that includes just those properties of people that are of interest. We define the COMMUNICATING INDIVIDUAL as an abstrac-tion in linguistics that includes just those properties of the person that are required to account for his communicative behavior.
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