Do we need to be silent to be extremely polite? Silence and FTAs1

Maria Sifianou

66 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Applied Linguistics

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies Discourse Analysis in Language Studies Linguistics and Language Analysis

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate the relationship between silence and politeness. More specifically, it focuses on Brown and Levinson's ([1978] 1987) superstrategydon't do the FTA(face‐threatening act) ‐ remain silent. It explores the nature of this superstrategy and the extent to which silence can realise the other major strategies for dealing with FTAs. It is claimed that this strategy is of restricted applicability and different in nature from all the others. It is suggested that the function of silence in the framework of this theory could be better understood as a realisation of the other superstrategies. Moreover, close examination of this strategy casts further doubts on the claimed hierarchy of the strategies and the universal applicability of the model.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 66 citations exist upstream.

References

1987Politeness 2016Principles of Pragmatics 1985Structures of Social Action 1978Questions and politeness : strategies in social interaction 1984Narrative, Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication 1987Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?1974Language and Social Context 1993The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives

Cited by

2016Discursive Self in Microblogging 1998Self‐reports on silence as a face‐saving strategy by people with hearing impairment 2007Teasing in contact encounters: Frames, participant positions and responses 2016Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech Acts, Stories and Self-Praise 2021“Blowing our own trumpet”: Self-praise in Peninsular Spanish face-to-face communication

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.