Teasing at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of face work in performing and responding to teases

Abstract

In this article, I examine teasing in the laughter-talk of two transcribed spoken corpora of press briefings held at the White House, one from the Democrat and one from the Republican administrations. Categorizations are developed, firstly, of types and functions of teases and, secondly, of types and functions of responses to teases, as produced by both the podium and the assembled press. Important implications for face/(im)politeness theory become apparent. Speakers appear to have two different kinds of face, competence and affective. The problem for any given individual is that the two types of face work are frequently incompatible. Bolstering the one type of face may well diminish the other, and careful considerations are necessary when indulging in teasing of others (or indeed oneself) and in calibrating how to respond to being teased. The article is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS).