Eliciting the unsayable: Chinese teachers’ approximation elicitors in out-of-class settings

Recent research has substantiated that schematic negative faces are found more efficiently than positive faces among crowds of distractor faces of varying set sizes. The present study asks whether this relative search asymmetry (RSA) is intention driven or due to involuntary attentional capture. To that aim, participants were first tested in a condition in which negative and positive faces were searched for, and then in a condition in which negative or positive schematic faces appeared at chance level at the position of the target (valid trials) or of a distractor (invalid trials), the faces thus being task irrelevant (the 1/n paradigm). The expected search benefit for valid negative-face target trials most clearly occurred when participants searched for a target defined by a conjunction of color and position; when the target was defined either by an orientation or color singleton, we found rather weak or no evidence for involuntary attention capture by negative faces. We see the results as being (1) evidence that the RSA is partly based on stimulus-driven factors that occur independently of the intention to search for a positive or negative face, and (2) consistent with the assumption that the effects are mainly due to a more efficient rejection of positive-face than of negative-face distractors, rather than being due to attentional capture by the target.

Understanding the concept and role of ‘face’ is of great importance in the process of establishing successful communication.  As for successful communication, it is a prerequisite for establishing successful relationship and achieving goals. The term ‘face’ in the sense of ‘reputation’, ‘good name’ was first used in English  language in 1876 as a translation of the Chinese term ΄diū liăn΄ in the phrase ‘preparations by which China lost face’ (Thomas, 1995:168).  Since then, the word ‘face’ has been widely used in concepts such as ‘loosing face’ and ‘saving face’. Speaking about ‘face’, Brown and Levinson  mention ‘Negative and Positive Face’. ‘Positive Face’ presents strategies of friendship and harmony and expresses a person’s wish to be positively assessed by other people. ‘Negative Face’ means a person’s wish not to be restricted by other people. However, both ‘positive face’ and ‘negative face’ may be in danger and consequently we have an act of damaging face (Brown, Levinson 1987:60). It is also worth noting that in his theory P. Brown and S. Levinson discuss politeness as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. ‘Positive politeness’ strategies are directed to the ‘positive face’ of the listener and express solidarity, close friendship and informality, while ‘negative politeness’ strategies are directed to the ‘negative face’ of the listener and are expressed by restraint, formality and distance. Thus, understanding the concept of face and its role for successful communication and relationships is of great importance not only from a linguistic, but also from an extra-linguistic point of view.

This paper re-examines theories of linguistic politeness in Japanese, and holds that linguistic politeness is a very complicated issue influenced by multiple factors in different layers including general face wants of participants, the participants’ societal positions and social relationships, social norm that the interactants share, the interactants’ discernment or interpretation of the social rules, immediate context of the interaction, and possible strategies for the interactants to choose under the constrains of the other simultaneously functioning factors. Based on the data collected from recent Japanese TV dramas, this study maintains that, as a general principle, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) theory of face does apply to Japanese language and culture and forms the base of politeness. Similarly as in any other culture, facework in successful communication in Japanese is a result of choice by an interlocutor in accordance with normative polite practices. What makes linguistic politeness in Japanese unique is not that Japanese speakers need to act appropriately according to their social norm, but that their discernment (wakimae) and recognition of the social position and relationship (tachiba) of the participants, which form the second layer of the determining factors of politeness, make speakers of Japanese always attend to and try to fulfil the other participant’s face want including both positive and negative face, and, at the same time, maintain their own positive face but rarely claim their own negative face especially when an interactant has less power and in a lower social position in an interaction. The data also suggest a model of face-redressing strategies co-occurring with face threatening acts (FTA) in Japanese.

Nagging is a persuasive tactic yet to be fully explored in instructional communication. Nagging involves an exchange in which a student makes persistent requests of an instructor who fails to comply. The purpose of the study was to examine student nagging behavior and, specifically, to examine nagging as a potentially face threatening act as part of Politeness Theory. Students (n=189) described a nagging exchange with an instructor by reporting on one of eight nagging strategies. Nagging is threatening to the positive and negative face of both students and instructors, with the Elicit Sympathy nag the most threatening to the students’ positive face, and the Demonstrate Frustration with the Instructor nag the most threatening to the instructors’ positive face. The Strike a Deal nag was found to be the most threatening to the students’ negative face, and the Flatter Instructor nag the most threatening to the instructors’ negative face. The majority of these face threatening acts are committed off record, or indirectly, and with a degree of ambiguity.

Nowadays, movie is a media which has a biggest impact for the people. With movie people can learn about language. Language is procedure by human for communication with other people. Pragmatics is the strategies to analyze what the purposes of the utterance understanding, in pragmatics there have politeness to known how people express their negative and positive face. When people approximately impressive that threatens an additional face, it is shows how a face threatening act’s (FTA’s). When people talk with the other they apply positive and negative face in communication to save threatening acts. This article examines is how the analysis of politeness in Harry Potter Chapter 1 Movie. The author tries to analyze negative face, positive face on dialogue in this movie. Politeness strategies can be finds from face threat and how the speakers produce the words and gesture to communicate between actor in the characters. This research is observes by the author, because the subject on this research are movie to known how the actor and actress used their face in the dialogue of it. The result in this research aims it is essential for language learners study about politeness principles in instruction to increase a good communication.Keywords: Face Threatening Act’s, Negative and Positive Face, Movie, Politeness.

Differing perceptions of face in British and Japanese academic settings

This research aims to investigate the face-threatening acts (FTAs) on illocutionary utterances found in a 2016 US presidential debate. A descriptive qualitative approach and document analysis were applied in this research. The data source of this research is the transcript of the last debate of the US presidential election in 2016. The illocutionary utterances were identified and categorized based on the five types of illocutionary utterances in Austin and Searle’s theory, and the data were analyzed using Brown and Levinson’s theory of FTAs. The result shows the illocutionary utterances that contain most FTAs are expressive illocutionary utterances (40.62%), directive illocutionary utterances (20.83%), assertive illocutionary utterances (17.70%), commissive illocutionary utterances (16.66%), and declarative illocutionary utterances (4.16%). Next, the most common FTAs the debater performs are the speaker’s negative face (33 times), followed by the hearer’s positive face, the hearer’s negative face, and the speaker’s positive face. This research has also shown that the speaker’s positive face does not always threaten the hearer’s positive or negative face, and vice versa.

Two studies investigated whether apologies or thanks are preferred in asking favors in the United States and Korea, and how this relates to perceptions of reduction in positive and negative face threats. In the first study (n = 224), participants composed an e-mail message where a favor was asked. In the second (n = 807), participants completed questionnaires including a prototypical e-mail for the situation described in Study 1, as well as measures of negative and positive face threats. Findings showed that (a) Koreans more frequently included apologies in favor-asking messages, while Americans more frequently included thanks; and (b) Americans considered repeated thanks to reduce the threat to hearers' negative and positive face, but Koreans considered repeated apologies to reduce the threat to speakers' positive face.

This study investigated cultural differences in apology intentions moderated by the threatened face type and the relationship between interactants. With Chinese and U.S. undergraduate participants, this study revealed that (a) offending acts were more face-threatening toward a stranger than toward a friend; (b) apology intention was stronger for a stranger than for a friend; (c) for threatening negative face, Americans had stronger apology intentions than did Chinese, whereas for threatening positive face, Chinese had stronger apology intentions than did Americans; (d) situational variations in negative and positive face threats significantly related to apology intentions; and (e) Americans' apology intention, compared with Chinese, was more strongly related to amount of negative face threat in each act.

This discourse analysis is aimed to investigate the what sorts of speech acts have illocutionary power in constructing academic discussions and the ways speech acts such as disagreements framed and organized such as in turn-taking in oral academic discussions and how face threatening and maintaining self- mage are conceptualized. This includes thirty minutes conversation between the instructor and her students in a classroom setting. The nature of interaction from the verbal exchanges in academic discussions were examined, analyzed and clarified based on the Speech Act Theory of Austin and Searle, Frame Theory of Goffman and Tannen and lastly, Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson. The results showed that the sorts of speech acts have illocutionary power in constructing academic discussions and there are ways that speech acts such as disagreements are framed and organized such as in turn-taking in oral academic discussions in order to maintain the social image of the participants of conversation. Verbal interaction at discussions has its way in maintaining the face-work like threatening and displaying positive image. The aspects of face as basic wants are composed of negative and positive faces are applied to acts threatening positive or negative face, and the three variables are - power, social distance and imposition can be applied in just a small segment of conversation. It was revealed that keying’ which consists of an “openly admitted” transformation of untransformed activity and concerns a systematic reworking of

Language is one of the communication tools used by everyone in interacting with other people. Every word spoken by a language speaker has meaning and purpose, either directly or indirectly. Any expression that belongs to a face-threatening act, whatever it may be and goes against the wishes of the speaker's face, and any part of the speech is considered a face-threatening act. Pragmatics is a strategy to analyze what is the purpose of understanding speech, in pragmatics, there is politeness to knowing how people express negative and positive faces. When people talk to other people, they apply both positive and negative faces in communication to save threatening actions. In this study, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone analyzed face- threatening actions using the theory of Brown and Levison. In the study aims to determine the verbal face shape used by Rubeus Hagrid in the film. The research procedure is watching a movie or script on youtube, identifying and paying attention to the forms of actions that threaten their faces and classifying positive and negative politeness strategies. The results showed that there are 24 face-threatening actions from 3 forms of threatening actions (actions that threaten the listener's positive face, actions that threaten the listener's negative face, and actions that threaten the speaker's positive) and 4 threatening strategies1)Off –record, 2) Bald on record, 3) negative politeness, 4) positive politeness. For the response of his interlocutor, Rubeus Hagrid often responds to his interlocutor directly. Keywords: Face Threatening Acts, politeness Strategy, Harry potter movie

To test whether threatening visual information receives prioritized processing, many studies have examined visual search for emotional schematic faces. Still, it has remained unclear whether negative or positive schematic faces are processed more efficiently. We used continuous flash suppression, a variant of binocular rivalry, to render single emotional schematic faces invisible and measured whether negative or positive faces have an advantage in accessing awareness. Across three experiments, positive faces were detected more quickly than negative faces. A fourth experiment indicated that this positive face advantage was unrelated to the valence of the face stimuli but due to the relative orientation of the mouth curvature and the face contour. These findings demonstrate the impact of configural stimulus properties on perceptual suppression during binocular rivalry and point to a perceptual confound present in emotional schematic faces that might account for some ambiguous results obtained with schematic face stimuli in previous studies.

Face Threatening Act (FTA) refers to speech acts that can damage an individual's public self-image or face. Face involves two fundamental social needs: the need to feel appreciated, accepted, and valued by others, which relates to positive face, and the need to maintain autonomy and freedom from external imposition, which relates to negative face. These dual needs shape how individuals manage their self-image in social interactions and influence the use of language. This study aims to analyze William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure through the lens of Face Threatening Act (FTA) theory to explore how language reflects power, morality, and identity. This study applies a qualitative descriptive method to examine how different types of FTAs function within the drama. The analysis reveals a distribution of FTAs with threats to hearers' negative face being the most frequent (28.1%), followed by speakers' positive face (25.0%), hearers' positive face (24.2%), and speakers' negative face (22.7%). These findings highlight the complex interpersonal and social dynamics dramatized through language. The study concludes that Measure for Measure vividly portrays the tensions between individual dignity and institutional authority through strategic use of language in dramatic discourse

The current study examined national culture differences between US American and Chinese participants (N = 317) regarding face need concerns and apology intention, based on positive and negative face needs (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and concerns for self-face and other-face (Ting-Toomey, 2005). Participants read vignettes that varied in relationship types (in-group vs. out-group members) and situation types (negative face vs. positive face threatening) and responded to scales measuring realism of the vignettes, intention to apologize, and five types of face need concerns. The findings showed that Chinese participants, compared to US Americans, had stronger intentions to apologize when their acts threatened the other person's positive face, while US American participants, compared to Chinese, had stronger intentions to apologize when their acts threatened the other's negative face. Other findings and implications thereof are discussed.

This study examines the impact of face orientation and face threat levels on the acceptability of the religious expression /ʔallah jaʕtiːk ilʕaːfjɪə/ in Spoken Jordanian Arabic. This research is grounded in politeness theory and contemporary face management frameworks. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study first identifies the main pragmatic functions of the religious marker. Next, it examines how native speakers interpret face-related factors and how these interpretations affect which pragmatic functions they consider most appropriate in context. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions that collectivistic values and a preference for positive face orientation consistently determine communicative practices in Middle Eastern contexts. Instead, the data suggest that speakers frequently select negative face orientations, emphasizing autonomy and minimizing imposition, rather than consistently favoring pragmatic functions that reinforce group harmony and positive face. Particularly as the perceived social threat increases. However, the findings also suggest that the sanctity of religious expressions limits respondents’ willingness to use them in high-stakes situations. Notably, there were no instances in the data where participants used religious expressions to convey negative face in high-risk scenarios, indicating a clear boundary in their pragmatic choices. The study advances theoretical discussions on face and politeness and suggests a novel methodological framework for exploring religious communication practices.