A Contrastive Study On Face-threatening Acts And Politeness Strategies Between Successful And Unsuccessful Job Interviewees

In this paper,the author takes twenty three interviewees' response discourses as the corpus from the TV Show You Are Hired in order to make a contrastive analysis of the language differences between successful and unsuccessful job interviewees based on Brown and Levinson's Face Theory,especially the positive politeness strategy and the negative politeness strategy.The two questions will be settled in this paper.(1)What kinds of FTAs and politeness strategies are used by interviewees in the job interview?How do these FTAs and politeness strategies distribute in job interview and how about their usage frequency?(2)Is there any difference in the use of FTAs and politeness strategies between successful job interviewees and unsuccessful ones?If there are differences between them,what are the differences?Finally,the author finds out that(1)In the job interview,the interviewees adopt eight kinds of face threatening acts which consists of four kinds of positive FTAs and four negative ones,and sixteen kinds of politeness strategies including eleven kinds of positive politeness strategies and five negative politeness strategies.(2)From the perspective of the comparison of FTAs and politeness strategies between the successful interviewees and unsuccessful interviewees,the unsuccessful interviewees take more FTAs than successful ones in general,especially in the usage of such positive face threatening acts as contempt and disapproval.As for the negative FTAs,the successful interviewees adopt more orders and requests to threaten the interviewer's negative faces.From the perspective of the politeness strategies,whether comparing generally or from the aspects of positive strategy and negative strategy respectively,the author finds out that successful interviewees'politeness strategies are more than those of unsuccessful ones.As for the positive strategies,both successful interviewees and unsuccessful ones are inclined to use the strategy of avoiding disagreement and seeking agreement.However,the successful interviewees are obviously more willing to give their explanation than the unsuccessful ones.On the contrary,the unsuccessful ones use less the strategies like making promise and including H and S.From the aspect of the negative politeness strategies,most of the successful interviewees will use the strategies like being conventionally indirect and minimizing the imposition mentioned to express their request or some demands.However,the unsuccessful interviewees are inclined to use the negative strategy of hedge.This research will not only provide people with a theoretical theory in how to use interview language correctly,but also offer some practical suggestions to those who plan to attend job interview,especially TV show job interview.