Face-threatening Acts
According to Brown and Levinson, positive and negative face exist universally in human culture. In social interactions, face-threatening acts are at times inevitable based on the terms of the conversation. A face threatening act is an act that inherently damages the face of the addressee or the speaker by acting in opposition to the wants and desires of the other. Most of these acts are verbal; however, they can also be conveyed in the characteristics of speech (such as tone, inflection, etc.) or in non-verbal forms of communication. At minimum, there must be at least one of the face threatening acts associated with an utterance. It is also possible to have multiple acts working within a single utterance.
Read more about this topic: Politeness Theory
Famous quotes containing the word acts:
“It is not enough to ask, ‘Will my act harm other people?’ Even if the answer is No, my act may still be wrong, because of its effects on other people. I should ask, ‘Will my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people?’ The answer may be Yes. And the harm to others may be great. If this is so, I may be acting very wrongly, like the Harmless Torturers.”
—Derek Parfit (b. 1943)