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indexing face concerns, provide it seems little analytical purchase where face
concerns are not an issue - where they are not potentially of actually threatened.
Of course, the fundamental weakness with the equilibric framework for
understanding facework practices is the lack of an explicit model set out by
Goffman. One suspects that this is in no small part down to the difficulty with
pinning down equilibric as opposed to non-equilibric, or equilibric reparative (see
fig. 1.1) facework practices. It may be then that - at least in considering equilibric
facework practices - the analytical purchase offered by the Goffmanian framework
of facework is at best heuristic.
Conversely, Brown and Levinson's conceptualisations
of face (see Chapter
1) allowed for the development and presentation of a systematic model for the
analysis of facework as politeness in discourse. Subsequently this has gone on to
become the seminal framework for facework researchers. What brown and
Levinson present is essentially a hierarchical ordering of facework practices
ranging from direct and unmitigated utterances to ones encoding negative
politeness (see fig. 1.2). To append this framework and allow a systematic analysis
of specific utterances, Brown and Levinson present a series of specific ways in
which both positive and negative politeness can be encoded. This approach to
facework as specific linguistic manifestations of politeness provides the researcher
with a clearly defined set of strategies and a codification system for specific
linguistic units of analysis.
Drawing on Brown and Levinson's model, scholars have turned to the
analysis of facework in a range of settings and contexts. Subsequently, Brown and
Levinson's framework has been successfully applied to include encounters
between strangers, interaction in work settings, consultations between medical
practitioners and patients, talk between intimate partners, courtroom cross-
questioning episodes, and obscure contexts such as talk between aircraft crew in
potential emergency situations. The applicability of the politeness model to these
varied situations and contexts bears impressive testimony to the analytical
purchase of the facework as politeness approach.
However, several weakness with the framework have been identified. For
instance, rather than being influenced primarily by - as Brown and Levinson claim -
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