Volume 9, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Face, identity and im/politeness

Identity and face are each an imagining of the self, or of another, within a public sphere involving multiple actors. Because they have come into language and discourse research from different directions, researchers frame them in such a way that they can seem only tangentially related. This article examines what binds and distinguishes them, by approaching a set of conversational data – all from Scotland, yet crossing perceived cultural and linguistic boundaries – from the point of view of both the face work and the identity work undertaken by the participants. Identity and face are often taken as representing durative and punctual ways of looking at the same phenomena. Yet explanations of punctual actions and events always have recourse to durative characteristics of those who perform them; and evidence for those durative characteristics is drawn from the punctual actions and events interpreted as embodying and indexing them. This complexity is multiplied by that of the different scales on which face and identity are observed and indexed.

Although (socio)linguistic studies of im/politeness and identities present many parallels in their disciplinary trajectories, not least the shift toward interactional approaches, there is still scope and need for bringing the two traditions together and fruitfully exploring their intersections in method and analysis. In this paper, I put forth a proposal for studying im/politenessin- interaction on the basis of small stories as a framework for narrative and identity analysis. My analysis shows how focusing on the stories’ ways of telling, sites, and tellers and drawing on the concept of positioning sheds light on the tellers’ management of particular im/politeness norms in the uses of and behavior in new media sites. I show how im/politeness and identities construction are interwoven in such cases.

This article draws on positioning theory and uses Bamberg’s (2005) three-level analytic approach to analyze how identity construction and relational work implicate the other and are co-constitutive processes in local interactions. To that end, it examines a sequence of excerpts taken from an interview involving the author and a Vietnamese woman and analyzes the co-constructed positioning of self and other that developed over the course of the interview conversation. The article focuses on how (non)delicate topics are introduced, responded to, modified and developed as the interviewee reports on past experience and adopts evaluative stances toward topics initiated by the interviewer. The study further highlights how normative ideologies are indexed and reconstituted in such talk, and points to their role in making particular identities relevant and in mobilizing relational work in local interactions.

Premised on the belief that both identity construction and im/politeness assessments relate to norms associated with genre practices, the aim of this paper is to examine the interconnections between identity co-construction and impoliteness in a media genre: the talent show. This aim is innovative in so far as im/politeness has traditionally been related to the notion of face, rather than identity. Our study draws upon a corpus of 160 interactional sequences from the UK and US versions of the talent show Idol. All sequences in the data include music expert Simon Cowell, who has been singled out as playing the role of the malicious judge by both journalists and scholars. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has undertaken a micro-analysis of the linguistic resources deployed by Simon Cowell to construct his expert identity or has examined the role that impoliteness may play therein. This is what we set out to do in this paper. To that end, our analytic framework combines socio-constructivist approaches to identity construction (Anton and Peterson 2003; Joseph 2004; Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006) with a recently revised, discursive approach to im/politeness, i.e., the genre approach (Garcés- Conejos Blitvich 2010, this issue).