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aspect of some persons face at some point in the interaction is then, as several
scholars have noted, hugely complex. Cultural variation aside then (see Chapters 1
and 2), the analysis of discourse per se has become a complex array of issues.
There have been attempts to develop more discreet readings of facework in
discourse, sensitive to nuances in actual discourse practices missed by the
positive-negative, speaker-hearer based framework. This has led to alternative
terminologies such as personal and interpersonal face (Arndt and Janney 1987),
the refinement of the concept of positive face to arrive at a tripartite
conceptualisation of autonomy, approval, and competence aspects of face (Lim
and Bowers 1991), the inclusion of an intimate aspect of face in the form of social,
relational, relationship face (Cupach and Metts 1994), the inclusion of a more
collective nuance such as mutual face (Ting-Toomey 1988), as well as highlighting
the orientation of discourse to non-present third party's face (e. g. Shimanoff 1987)4.
These studies have each posited preliminary interpretive schema - usually in the
form of typologies of utterances. The basic tenets of positive and negative face
remain however largely in place and underlie the majority of attempted recastings
or developments of the facework as politeness framework.
This multifunctionality of the 'utterance' becomes further complicated when
one moves out from facework as an issue of encoding specific utterances, to
consider the more diffuse and indeterminate
flow of interaction that is naturally
occurring ongoing conversation. The analytical purchase the politeness framework
does afford us in the analysis of certain specific utterances seems even less at
home in this particular discourse environment. A handful of scholars have
attempted to resolve this latter issue by considering not the utterance as the
appropriate unit of analysis, but rather the 'episode'. This rather fuzzy discourse
unit is characterised by Wood and Kroger as:
... any identifiable segment of social life, organised according to a
principle of unity and having a recognizable beginning, course, and
ending. The social episode is the ethogenic unit of analysis; it provides
the context for the interpretation of the meaning of utterances for social-
psychological purposes ... context refers to the social episode in play and
its component parts: the definition of the situation, the kinds of
relationships of the persons involved and the relevant rules or
conventions. (Wood and Kroger 1994,256-257)5
This emphasis on the situated contingencies of facework appears to counter
many of the criticisms outlined above, and echoes comments by scholars such as
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