POLITENESS, FACE, AND IDENTITY 55
threatening or face enhancing. The subsequent broad review of approaches to discourse analysis and of recent developments in discursive politeness studies has guided me to a discursive and constructive approach to politeness and face work. This approach requires analysts to seek sequential and /or linguistic accountability based on their knowledge of the relevant communities of practice. Various linguistic and discursive structures (e.g. preference organization, contextualization cues, membership categorization devices, discourse markers) and analytical procedures pertaining to face-related issues (e.g. solidarity, alignment, autonomy, competence) encountered during this review have suggested viable ways to achieve accountability in the discursive analysis of facework.
2.6 Summary
This chapter has provided an overview of studies on linguistic politeness and of several issues associated with notions of face, types of politeness, and sociolinguistic variables affecting the enactment of politeness. As mentioned at several points in the discussion, it is my belief that the utilization of naturalistic discourse data will lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon of politeness.
In several sections of the chapter, I have delineated the relationship between politeness and various approaches to discourse analysis. Among the features of conversation analysis and discourse analysis (as applied in discursive psychology), preference organization, and participant identity and subjectivity, were shown to be closely related to the notion of face. From the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics, I reviewed Tannen’s (1994) conceptualization of power and solidarity, and the relationship of these dimensions to positive and negative face.
In the subsequent sections, I introduced recent discursive approaches to politeness and synthesized associated unresolved issues which, in turn, informed my reconsideration of the notion of face with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) cognitive adaptation, I explained why I chose the Goffmanian approach as the basic notion underpinning my framework. Next I clarified the relationship between face and identity, to underscore my conceptualization of face and facework and its potential benefits. Towards the end of the synthesis, the relationship between face and politeness was critically examined. Evan though facework cannot be equated with politeness, my argument situates face evaluations at the core of politeness evaluations.