Strategic embarrassment and face threatening in business interactions

Abstract

Face threats are generally studied as either something to be avoided or reduced in politeness research, or as deliberate forms of aggression in impoliteness research. The notion of face threat itself, however, has remained largely dependent on the intuitive notion of threatening. In Face Constituting Theory (Arundale, Robert, 2010. Constituting face in conversation: face, facework and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics 42, 2078Pragmatics 42, -2105, an approach to theorising face threats is posited that goes beyond such pre-theoretical notions. The advantages of employing such an analytical framework is that interactional practices which are open to evaluation as face threatening can be explicated in a manner that is grounded in the perspective of the participants, yet the range of practices examined can be expanded beyond that encompassed by folk or firstorder conceptualisations of face. In this paper examples of one such practice, namely, strategic embarrassment, where the speaker attempts to embarrass the addressee into doing what he or she wants by topicalising unmet expectations and thereby implying a mild reproach or complaint, is examined in the context of business interactions in Taiwan. The way in which this action is interactionally achieved coordinate with constituting evaluations of face threat is outlined before considering the implications of this analysis for politeness and impoliteness research more broadly. Strategic embarrassment and face threatening in business interactionsWei-Lin Melody Chang and Michael Haugh* (School of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University) Abstract:Face threats are generally studied as either something to be avoided or reduced in politeness research, or as deliberate forms of aggression in impoliteness research. The notion of face threat itself, however, has remained largely dependent on the intuitive notion of threatening. In Face Constituting Theory (Arundale, Robert, 2010. Constituting face in conversation: face, facework and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics 42, 2078Pragmatics 42, -2105, an approach to theorising face threats is posited that goes beyond such pre-theoretical notions. The advantages of employing such an analytical framework is that interactional practices which are open to evaluation as face threatening can be explicated in a manner that is grounded in the perspective of the participants, yet the range of practices examined can be expanded beyond that encompassed by folk or first-order conceptualisations of face. In this paper examples of one such practice, namely, strategic embarrassment, where the speaker attempts to embarrass the addressee into doing what he or she wants by topicalising unmet expectations and thereby implying a mild reproach or complaint, is examined in the context of business interactions in Taiwan. The way in which this action is interactionally achieved coordinate with constituting evaluations of face threat is outlined before considering the implications of this analysis for polit...

Conceptualising ‘the relational’ in pragmatics: Insights from metapragmatic emotion and (im)politeness comments

“…Conversational analysts and ethnomethodologists would argue that such perspectives can (and should) be inferred from the unfolding discourse, and this is the line that Arundale (2006Arundale ( , 2010 takes. Haugh (2010: 155) points out such evaluations may also "surface in interaction in the form of metapragmatic comments *…+, or through paralinguistic or non-verbal cues *…+" and illustrates this in a recent study (Chang and Haugh 2011). However, ethnographers would argue that discourse is just one source of data, and that valuable insights can be gained -and in fact are needed -by studying the fuller context, such as through (non)-participant observation and conducting interviews.…”

“…However, ethnographers would argue that discourse is just one source of data, and that valuable insights can be gained -and in fact are needed -by studying the fuller context, such as through (non)-participant observation and conducting interviews. Chang and Haugh (2011) have recently demonstrated the need for this in their study of strategic embarrassment and face threats in business interactions; they found that background knowledge about the participants' ongoing relationship helped them interpret the interactional practices in a more contextually grounded and 'accurate' way.…”

“…A more focused approach has very recently been taken by Chang and Haugh (2011). They examine strategic face threatening in business interactions and link it with the emotion embarrassment.…”

“…Recent articles in the Journal of Pragmatics (e.g. Arundale 2010, Chang andHaugh 2011) have also explored a relational perspective, and Enfield (2009: 60) has called for a greater focus on relationships in pragmatics research, arguing that since relationships are a "primary locus of social organization", they should "constitute a key focus for pragmatics".…”

The dynamics of complaining in a Latin American for-profit commercial setting

“…The analysis concentrates on some of the resources mobilised by the participants to construct the complaint including the ways in which face concerns are manifested interactionally (e.g. Haugh 2010;Chang and Haugh 2011, Márquez Reiter 2009,Orthaber and Márquez Reiter 2011Ruhi 2010) given the interpersonally delicate nature of the activity.…”