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Face (sociological concept)

About: Face (sociological concept) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5171 publications have been published within this topic receiving 96109 citations. The topic is also known as: Lose face & Face (sociological concept).


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TL;DR: The authors argue that the kind of individualistic ethos Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness model is accused of is not simply a reflection of British culture, but a reflection on British culture at a specific point in time.
Abstract: In this paper we argue that the kind of individualistic ethos Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness model is accused of — and in particular its notion of (non-imposition) negative face — is not simply a reflection of British culture, but a reflection of British culture at a specific point in time. That point is the nineteenth century. Before then, the notion of an individual self separate from society and with its own hidden desires was not fully established. We argue that sociocultural developments, such as secularisation, the rise of Protestantism, social and geographical mobility, and the rise of individualism, created conditions in which the self became part of a new ideology where it was viewed as a property of the individual, and was associated with positive values such as self-help, self-control and self-respect. We also trace the history of conventional indirect requests, specifically can/could you X structures, the most frequent request structures used in British English today and, moreover, emblematic of British negative politeness. We show how such ability-oriented structures developed in the nineteenth century, and propose a tentative explanation as to why ability in particular was their focus.

80 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors show how British MPs employ politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987) as a device to make their discourse abide by the rules of Erskine May's Treatise on the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament.

80 citations

01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: In a subsequent study, the authors found that the mere thought of being that close to a politician made my mother-in-law "sick to her stomach" and she turned her head away from the television in disgust.
Abstract: It was March 2003 and my motherinlaw was visiting from Berkeley. I was watching George W. Bush speak to the nation about the impending war with Iraq. As she walked into the room, she turned her head away from the television in disgust. “Aach!” she exclaimed, “I can’t bear to have that man in my face. It makes me sick to my stomach!” Of course, the president was not actually in her face, he was speaking to us from Washington, D.C. But as I watched, the images to a significant extent bore out her impression. For the next twenty minutes, I viewed George Bush from a far more intimate, closeup visual perspective than I had viewed my own family across the dinner table. His face often filled the entire television frame, so much so that the top of his head was cut off. To obtain the same visual perspective in person, my motherinlaw would need to be either his lover or his dentist. Given her politics, the mere thought of being that close probably did make her sick to her stomach. While I initially had considered her statement a display of political histrionics, when viewed from this perspective it seemed far more plausible that she might have such a visceral reaction. Television gives us a unique visual perspective on other human beings, one that is far more intimate than we are accustomed to having with strangers in everyday life. But I had not previously thought about the consequences this might have for how we react to politicians and politics. As a film student in college, I learned to use the closeup camera shot to create a sense of emotional intensity in films: but do we really want that kind of intimacy with our politicians? In facetoface social contexts, there are strong social norms guiding © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.

79 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines speech-style shifts in academic consultation sessions between professors and students in Japanese universities and demonstrates that politeness is an interactional achievement, and reanalyzes what was previously described as a display of 'discernment' as an active co-construction in which the grammatical structures and the sequential organization of talk serve as resources for the participants to construct their identities in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction.
Abstract: From a social constructionist perspective, this paper examines speech-style shifts in academic consultation sessions between professors and students in Japanese universities and demonstrates that politeness is an interactional achievement. It has been argued that politeness in Japanese society is predominantly 'discernment (wakimae)', which differs from 'volition (i. e., strategic politeness based on face needs)' as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). This paper attempts to demonstrate that the dichotomy between the two types of politeness - 'discernment' and 'volition' - is irrelevant. It reanalyzes what was previously described as a display of'discernment' as an active co-construction in which the grammatical structures and the sequential organization of talk serve as resources for the participants to construct their identities in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction.

79 citations


Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20248
20235,479
202212,139
2021284
2020199
2019207