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indirectness and lack of explicitness requires more inferential work to determine
what a speaker meant. Wierzbicka (1985) has also identified salient differences
in terms of directness across a range of speech acts and discourse strategies
between English and Polish speakers. These extend not only to particular
speech acts, but to speaker disposition vis-6-vis their own and their interlocutors
stances in talk, with Polish speakers valuing a holding to personal beliefs and a
reluctance to concede these to interlocutors' stances, something that in English
generally attracts disapproval.
Although not specifically highlighting conceptual problems with and
pointing to development s in the concept of face, this body of work has
demonstrated the fact that some cultures routinely engage in what to an Anglo-
American, and perhaps more so to Asian culture, would be perceived as highly
face-threatening behaviour. However, just as facework and politeness in these
latter sets of cultures leads to a maintenance of interpersonal equilibrium, so it
does in cultures normatively orienting to a more direct and potentially conflictual
communicative style.
This work highlights the problems associated with an ethnocentric view
of what constitutes facework and facework and'... all cultures value agreement
more than disagreement, discourage self-praise, encourage praise of others,
and view imposition as the main sin in interaction' (Wierzbicka 1991,69). It
appears that some cultures are able to engage in essentially conflictual
interaction, whereby selves are essentially mobilised as the foci of expressive
stances and symbolically 'pitted' against each other, whilst at the same time
maintaining an equilibric state of interaction in which face needs are mutually
catered for. Rather than an overriding centrifugal force sending members of
such cultures spinning into atomistic incommensurability, persons are held
together in a state of equilibrium.
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