The Application Of The Face-saving Strategies In Spoken English-Analyses Of The Clips From Friends

Politeness is a research area that has aroused a worldwide interest. However, present studies about politeness are mostly based on linguistic level and they neglect the fact that language and nonverbal behavior are integrated in human interaction. A study of face and politeness phenomenon in both verbal and nonverbal communication is of valuable and importance.Among all the theories about politeness, Brown and Levinson's face theory is considered the most influential one. They proposed a rather systematic concept of"face", people's face wants and strategies of saving face. However, their theory is mainly based on verbal communication, with little consideration of nonverbal side of human interaction. As a matter of fact, nonverbal research has gradually showed a flourish from 1960s to 1990s, among which Malandro & Barker's contribution is considered to be authorative. They specified the categories of nonverbal communication and indicated the complementing, contradicting, accenting, regulating, repeating and substituting roles of nonverbal communication.This thesis takes Brown & Levinson's face theory and Malandro & Barker's communicative functions of nonverbal communication as the theoretical foundation of our study, and aims to answer two research questions: how do people use verbal interaction as strategies to save other's face out of politeness? How do people use nonverbal interaction as strategies to save other's face out of politeness?Data are all collected from American sitcom"Friends". We chose ten conversations as examples to analyze, which reveal both verbal and nonverbal information on one hand, and reflects face and politeness effects on the other hand. Transcription of data is done with words and pictures. The verbal part of data is tanscripted into words, and the nonverbal film images are also edited to illustrate the effects of nonverbal communication.Based on the analysis of the data, we have answered the research questions. When people used verbal interaction as strategies, they use politeness strategies, negative strategies and off-record strategies to save other's face, and factors like social distances and social power should be taken into consideration when saving other's face. When people use nonverbal interactions as strategies to save face, they complement, substitute, regulate, repeat, and accent the verbal content and strengthen the face-saving effect.In summary, verbal and nonverbal information interact upon each other. They both contribute to the face-saving and politeness effect in person-to-person interactions.