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:
“I fear I agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. Some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then I release my attention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment—like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)