Facework in Disagreements on Taiwanese and New Zealand Radio News Interviews

Abstract

Brown and Levinson (1987), in their model of politeness, claim that all individuals irrespective of language or culture have face, which they claim consists of two aspects: positive face and negative face. The former represents the individual's desire to be liked and approved of by others, while the latter represents the individual's desire for freedom of action and from imposition from others. Although Brown and Levinson's model of politeness has been hugely influential in the social sciences it has nevertheless attracted much criticism. The main criticism is directed at their claims to universality of positive and negative face. Critics argue that Brown and Levinson's positive and negative face conceptualize face in western individualistic cultures and do not accurately conceptualize face in non-western cultures. Researchers of Chinese face argue that Chinese face is more accurately conceptualized by the constructs mianzi and lian: the former represents a person's reputation achieved through getting on in life, through success and ostentation, while the latter represents the respect of the group for a person with a good moral reputation. Mao (1994), for example, claims that mianzi and lian differ to positive and negative face in their overall conceptualization and construction. This study compares the facework used in disagreements by Taiwanese and New Zealand interviewers on radio news interviews. It attempts to identify similarities and differences in the pragmatic strategies employed by the two groups of interviewers to pay attention to face in the context of talk involving disagreements. Disagreements made by Taiwanese and New Zealand interviewers directed at high-status and medium-status interviewees are compared along three dimensions of disagreement: (l) rate of disagreements; (2) disagreement strategies used to express disagreement; and (3) illocutionary modifying devices used for modifying the force of disagreement. The results from this study show that the Taiwanese interviewers used facework that reflected concerns for their mianzi while their New Zealand counterparts used facework that reflected concern for their positive and negative face. The Taiwanese interviewers disagreed at a lower rate than the New Zealand interviewers, used softer disagreement strategies to express disagreement than the New Zealand interviewers, and used different illocutionary modifying devices for modifying the force of disagreement to the New Zealand interviewers: the Taiwanese interviewers used softening devices that paid attention to their mianzi, while the New Zealand interviewers used softening devices that paid attention to their positive face. An important finding that emerged from the study was that Taiwanese facework manifests itself beyond the speech act level of disagreement and that concerns for mianzi in Taiwanese news interviews extended to talk in general and in the format of news interviews. The results provide substantive evidence to challenge Brown and Levinson's claim to universality of positive and negative face.