CHIN2600 Chap.10 Politeness, Face and Compliments in Chinese
Politeness, Face and Compliments in Chinese
Face, in the definition this course starts from, is the positive social standing a person lays claim to through the line others take them to have adopted in a given encounter.
Two things in that sentence do the work. Face is claimed, so it is not a possession, and the claim is made good by what others assume, so it is constituted between people rather than held by one of them.
The widely taught universal model of positive and negative face appears here only as background the readings position themselves against, on the argument that an imported framework distorts how face is actually achieved in interaction.
English talk about face is largely borrowed.
Maintaining, saving, losing and giving face all trace to Chinese expressions built on a morpheme whose older sense was the front of the head, extended to surface and then to appearance.
The course names two face terms and students reach for a neat split; treat it instead as an empirical question, because one interview study found one of the two clearly more salient in a particular business setting, which is a finding about a setting rather than a fact about the language.
Compliments dominate the applied half of this material because they are frequent, short, heavily coded and come with a built in second part.
Most of the implicit strategies avoid an evaluative adjective entirely, and replies sort into accepting, deflecting and rejecting. The stereotype that Chinese speakers reject compliments is under revision rather than settled, and a presentation that reports it as established is answering a question the course has moved past.
What this chapter covers
- 01
10.1 Face as claimed and jointly made, not as a possession
- 02
10.2 Etic frameworks, emic concepts, and emic practices
- 03
10.3 The borrowed expressions, and what the etymology tells you
- 04
10.4 Three layers of one utterance: what was said, what it did, what changed
- 05
10.5 Paying a compliment without stating one
- 06
10.6 Accepting, deflecting and rejecting, and why deflection breaks a two way scheme
- 07
10.7 Running the metapragmatic interview so it yields episodes rather than opinions
Running the metapragmatic interview so it yields more than opinions
- +2Treat the order as the method. The first two questions ask for definitions and will produce vague answers, which is fine: their function is to put the terms on the table in the participant's own wording.
- +3Recognise which questions generate data. The ones asking for episodes rather than definitions, because an episode can be analysed and a definition cannot.
- +3Stop asking questions when an episode arrives. Ask for the detail instead: who was present, what was said, what happened next.
- +2Look for the gap between the definition given at the start and the practice described later, because that gap is the difference between a concept and a practice that the whole week is built on.
Key terms
- Face
- The positive social standing a person lays claim to through the line others take them to have adopted in a given encounter. It is claimed rather than owned and is made good between participants.
- Emic account
- An account that explicates concepts in terms of the schemes and categories that members of the culture themselves regard as meaningful and appropriate, rather than in the analyst's imported terms.
- Face practice
- What participants actually do, turn by turn, that constitutes face. The course's key move is from studying the local concepts to studying these practices in interactional discourse.
- Illocutionary act
- The interactional function an utterance performs, such as requesting, complaining, inviting or apologising, as distinct from its propositional content and from the change it brings about.
- Perlocutionary act
- The change that takes place because a speaker produced an utterance and a hearer understood it, such as a request being granted. It is the layer where a compliment's reply lives.
- Deflecting response
- A reply to a compliment that neither accepts nor rejects it, such as seeking confirmation, crediting a third party, or doubting. Its existence is why a two category scheme distorts the data.
Politeness, Face and Compliments in Chinese FAQ
Does this course teach positive and negative face?
Not as its own framework. That model appears in the reading list only as background the course positions itself against, and the politeness taught here runs from a definition of face as a claimed social value, through the local Chinese concepts, to face as a joint accomplishment in interaction.
What is the difference between the two Chinese face terms?
Treat it as an empirical question rather than a dictionary entry. The course names both, and one interview study of business dealings reports informants finding one of them clearly more salient in that setting, which is a result about a context and not a settled contrast.
Is it true that Chinese speakers reject compliments?
That is the classic finding, and the study set on compliment responses asks in its own title whether it has changed. Reporting the stereotype as established fact answers a question the course has already moved past, and the assessed question session is where that will show.
Can I build a project entirely from interviews?
You can, provided you claim only what interviews reach. They are evidence of what participants report and how they account for it, not of what they do, and the most interesting finding is usually the gap between the two.
Assessment move
Run the six question interview once, on somebody willing, before you decide your topic. It takes twenty minutes, it produces at least one episode you can analyse, and it will tell you quickly whether face is a workable angle for the people you have access to.
Then code one recorded compliment exchange for the three reply types and notice how often the reply is a deflection, because that is the category a two way scheme would have forced you to misfile.
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