Face, Communication and Social Interaction - Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
5. “ That’s a myth”: Linguistic avoidance as a political face-saving strategy in broadcast interviews
Face, Communication and Social Interaction - Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini
Description
This paper follows on the heels of many others to reiterate that face within face-to-face communication, contrary to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) premise that social relations are some sort of a natural state of affairs to which interlocutors respond (Chilton, 1990: 201), is not constructed according to fixed socio-cultural or natural states of static relations but is constructed and re constructed in a dynamic and spontaneous way determined by the type of social interaction interlocutors are involved in. The paper tries to show that face-saving, as explained by Brown and Levinson (1987) and their followers, and political face-saving are different phenomena.