Face and Face Practices in Chinese Talk-in-Interaction: An Empirical Analysis of Business Interactions in Taiwan

Abstract

While face in academic discourse was firstly introduced by Goffman (1967), the notion of face was actually originally borrowed from the Chinese concept of mianzi. Face is thus an integral part of East-Asian cultures, particularly in Chinese society (Gao 1998, 2009; Ho 1976). Face has also been adopted as a means of examining various social phenomena, such as (im)politeness, conflict management, and impression management (Arundale 2006; Brown and Levinson 1987; Goffman 1967; Ting-Toomey 1988, 2005). This research aims to integrate emic and etic perspectives on face and face practices in Chinese (Chang and Haugh 2013), by examining how face is interactionally achieved and managed in actual Chinese institutional settings. This research builds on my previous honours dissertation (Chang 2008), which focused on interactional aspects of face in Taiwanese business settings. A key finding of that study was that it illustrated the significance of employing conversational analysis, rather than imposing theoretically-defined notions that may misrepresent face practices in interactional discourse (Chang and Haugh 2011b). However, to generalise from these findings of my honours dissertation requires larger and more diverse data sets. This research will pay particular attention to emic conceptualisations of face in Chinese and face practices, which to date have received only passing attention in the literature, in order to investigate how the participants interpret the actions and meanings in the course of the interaction in the business settings.