This paper investigates how English as a lingua franca is used to manage adversarial moments in casual conversation among friends, using conversation analysis and politeness theory. It presents a single case analysis of face negotiation devices utilized in two cases of third-party complaint sequences, in which complaints are made about someone else who is not present. The two cases to be analyzed were extracted from recordings of conversation of international students in British universities. The analysis revealed that the interactants utilize verbal and nonverbal devices, which are sometimes linguistically inexplicit but nonverbally resourceful, in a pragmatically sensitive manner in situ, thereby saving mutual face, intensifying the degree of face-threatening, or expressing disaffiliation in a face-saving way.

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