Volume 21, Issue 4

Ever since Goffman examined “face” in social interaction in 1955, researchers in intercultural and sociocultural pragmatics have employed the concept in many ways, and have developed a number of different positions on what the concept entails and on how to study it. Following Goffman, face is uniformly conceptualized as a phenomenon apparent in everyday interacting, but in focusing on the characteristics of face, researchers have routinely overlooked their conceptualizations of everyday interaction. This article examines twelve current conceptualizations of face, focusing particularly on their conceptualizations of everyday interacting and their implications for examining face, and providing researchers with bases for choosing a conceptualization that will be productive in addressing their research questions regarding face in everyday interacting.

In multi-lingual workplace interaction involving L2-speakers with different levels of proficiency, L1-speakers can be seen to use self-translation of their own prior contributions as a repair-practice to restore intersubjectivity. This paper shows that self-translations are produced in three environments: (a) in response to repair-initiation by recipients, (b) in response to inadequate or missing responses, (c) after disaffiliative responses in order to elicit a more favorable uptake. Self-translations therefore are not only used to deal with linguistic understanding problems, but can also use linguistic diversity as a resource for dealing with lack of affiliation and alignment. Self-translations are produced by a switch to the addressee’s L1 or to a lingua franca. They are only partial, being restricted to a translation of the core semantic content of the turn to be translated, thus relying heavily on a shared understanding of the pragmatic context and being designed so as to support interactional progression. Data come from video-taped meetings in Finland involving Finnish and Russian L1-speakers and various kinds of professional trainings in Germany involving instructors with German as L1 and refugees with various linguistic backgrounds.

Mock impoliteness is a social practice typifying the interaction of close friends consisting in the use of rude jokes or utterances that signify the speaker’s intent to show solidarity and intimacy with the interlocutor. Nonetheless, as an impolite load is still carried by such utterances, how targets of mock impoliteness will react to them, namely whether they will find them amusing or outright offensive, may depend on a series of factors. The present research focuses on how Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) face and sociality rights categories, together with gender (male/female) and lingua-culture (British English and Italian) interact to determine the acceptability degree of mock impolite jokes. This cross-cultural and cross-gender perception study, which placed its focus on the hearer’s evaluations, consisted in a rating task administered through an online questionnaire, and revealed that the interaction of the three factors determine the offensiveness versus acceptability of the jokes.