The Analysis of Face Work in Discourse

Abstract

The Brown-Levinson (1987) theory of politeness has attracted a great deal of attention from a variety of disciplines. However, the lack of systematic methods for assessing discourse in terms of politeness has hampered the evaluation and development of the theory and the comparison of findings from different studies. The authors present a proposal that attempts to address some of the limitations of previous approaches and to extend their application to facework. The authors describe a theme for conceptualizing facework in discourse based on an ethogenic hierarchical analysis of action sequences in social episodes. From that scheme a procedure is derived for coding discourse in terms of its functions with respect to the face of speakers and hearers. The procedure is illustrated with examples from a research project on the use of facework in letters of appeal in an academic context.