Chapter 14: Evaluating Concepts of Face

The concept of ‘face’ has been an important research topic since the first publication of politeness theory was presented by Brown and Levinson in 1978. It was Goffman (1955) who first introduced the notion. Goffman (1967) defined face as “an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes” (p. 5). However, it is Brown and Levinson’s (1978) application of face in the context of politeness theory that has dominated much of the debate thus far (Haugh, 2010, p. 2073). Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) further developed Goffman’s notion of face and presented two additional foci. According to Brown and Levinson (1978, p. 61), face is “highly abstracted” and subject to “cultural elaboration.” It is their dualistic notion of face, or public self-image, with matching positive and negative politeness behaviours, that is at the heart of their model and that departs most radically from both Goffman’s elaboration of face (and “face-work”) and Durkhaim’s “positive and negative ritual” (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003, p. 1460). That is, face constitutes the public self-image that every interlocutor wants to claim for himself or herself, and consists of two related aspects: positive face and negative face.