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asic irreducible sociological variables of power and distance between
interlocutors, discourse has been identified as being subject to a much broader
range of situated and relational contingencies. Thus, several scholars have called
into question the adequacy of the contextual sensitivity of Brown and Levinson's
framework. Further, certain omni-present discourse phenomena have been
identified which are not easily incorporated into the politeness based analysis of
discourse. Two such prominent examples are the need for self-oriented facework
and the uses of aggressive facework (see e. g. Baxter 1984; Cupach and Metts
1994; Coupland, Granger, and Coupland 1988; Craig, Tracey, and Spisak 1986;
Katriel 1986; Lim and Bowers 1991; Metts 1997; Muntigl and Turnbull 1998;
Penman 1990; Tracey 1990; Wilson et al 1991; Wood and Kroger 1994)1. The
facework as politeness model does not easily accommodate these and other
factors, and to that end suddenly appears rather limited in its ability to allow a full
interpretation of the contingencies of actual discourse usage.
Perhaps more fundamental problems lie with not the nature or complexity of
the analytical framework itself, but rather, in the central question of the ability of any
framework to fully cater for the complexity of utterance construction as encoding
face concerns. Finally, of course, even Brown and Levinson attempt to provide an
explicit framework for the analysis of facework in discourse and taking into account
the above criticism the emphasis again seems to be on facework practices as
operating essentially in the face of some actual or potential face-threat.
Alongside neglected aspects of discourse, utterances themselves have
been shown to be far from the unproblematic units of analysis implied by Brown
and Levinson's framework. Rather, speaker utterances have been shown to have
wide and complex array of functions vis-6-vis face, beyond their markedness for
positive and / or negative politeness. These observations have led to a growing
corpus of terminology employed across a range of studies to point to how specific
utterances can aggravate, antagonise, compensate, co-operate with, show
contempt for, depreciate, derogate, enhance, give, honour, mitigate, protect,
respect, restore, be neutral thr, save, or threaten various aspects of face. Further,
the multifunctional quality of single utterances points to the fact that they can
function to perform more than one of these things simultaneously, have their true
function non-determinate until subsequent utterances are made 2 or perhaps even
remain inaccessible
to persons outside of the relationship of the interlocutors at all 3
Trying to interpret the function and effects of a given utterance vis-6-vis some
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