THE ANALYSIS OF FACEWORK IN DISCOURSE - REVIEW AND PROPOSAL

The Brown-Levinson (1987) theory of politeness has attracted a great d eal of attention from a variety of disciplines. However, the lack of s ystematic methods for assessing discourse in terms of politeness has h ampered the evaluation and development of the theory and the compariso n of findings from different studies. The authors present a proposal t hat attempts to address some of the limitations of previous approaches and to extend their application to facework. The authors describe a t heme for conceptualizing facework in discourse based on an ethogenic h ierarchical analysis of action sequences in social episodes. From that scheme a procedure is derived for coding discourse in terms of its fu nctions with respect to the face of speakers and hearers. The procedur e is illustrated with examples from a research project on the use of f acework in letters of appeal in an academic context.