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equilibrium, Goffman in effect outlined a powerful and omni-present social
maxim that can be seen to guide interpersonal communicative behaviour.
Goffman's comments on the equilibric nature of interaction and the
societal practices used to maintain this interactional balance are - at the very
least in a heuristic sense - universally recognised. However, systematic
empirical application of the general equilibric framework to the actual analysis of
ongoing talk are relatively few and far between. This may be in no small part
due to the fact that Goffman's comments provided inspiration more than specific
instruction for empirical analysis. Further, the obvious potential for cross-cultural
analysis has received even less attention. This seems to be doubly unfortunate
as the potential for the cross-cultural application of the equilibric framework is
clear from Goffman's own conjectural comments. However, the second seminal
body of work which I will refer to here has led to a huge number of studies
applying the concept of face in a range of contexts and settings and, particularly
pertinent here, across a range of cultures and societies.
Although Goffman had provided a lucid exposition of the of concept of
face and facework back in the 1960s, it was not until Brown and Levinson's
(1937) work that the concept of face accorded systematic conceptual
development in the study of everyday discourse. This came in the form of the
second of the umbrella terms employed here, and quite a different general
framework for the analysis of facework in discourse - that of facework as
politeness 4.
Although once restricted to phenomena such as deference (e. g. Shils
1968), personal pronouns (e. g. Brown and Gilman 1960) and general 'good
manners' and 'appropriate behaviour' (as conveyed in etiquette books and
politeness manuals), the term politeness has come to refer to a much wider
range of discourse issues (see for example du Fon et al. 1994; Brown and
Levinson 1987; and Kasper 1990 for extensive bibliographies). What I will dub
here then the facework as politeness approach is just one of a wider body of
work addressing linguistic politeness. As with the terms 'face' and 'facework',
the term 'politeness' is used ubiquitously in scholarly publications, often with
little or no definition (Fraser 1990), and has become a 'definitially fuzzy and
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