Face(s) and Facework(s) in a Corpus of German and Italian Compliments

According to Goffmann, face is a relational construct (Goffman 1955: 213). Arundale goes further, describing face as ‘an emergent property of relationships, and therefore a relational phenomenon, as opposed to a social and psychological one’ (Arundale 2006: 201). Following his concept of face and his Face Constituting Theory the present work aims to investigate the facework in a corpus of compliments and compliment responses. The study is based on a multilingual corpus (Co.Cor Compliment Corpus, www.cocor.eu). Interactions collected in Germany (Baden-Württemberg) are compared with the ones gathered in Italy (Cancello ed Arnone, Southern Italy), in order to show how face is a matter of interpreting of persons-in-relationship and how both faces and relationships are conjointly constituted. The kind of act itself, its illocutionary force, needs to be negotiated among the interactants working as a social group and, in performing the compliments, the face of each participant is co-constructed and approved by the others. This is particularly evident in the Italian compliments elicited in Cancello ed Arnone (Southern Italy), where more than two people intervenes, lengthening the act. Each participant contributes with her/his opinion to the emerging of a collective face-support strategy, and the group-face is co-constituted as a mutual construct. The German sub-corpus displays different features: the act is often short and rarely performed by more than two interactants (the complimenter and the complimentee). Almost a quarter of German compliment responses are Reassurance Requests (Castagneto & Ravetto 2015: 399), often realized as direct questions to the complimenter (denkst du das wirklich? ‘do you really think that?’). The aim of this response type seems to be oriented to verify the truth-values and complimenter’s sincerity (Ravetto 2012: 107). Once more, this management of facework in the compliments is well-accepted among participants, so we can conclude that the faces of both complimenters and complimentees, as well as the act itself, flow from a joint interpretation. Moreover, comparing the compliment management in the two languages and cultures enlarges the view from micro- to macro-contexts, to culture-specific face-managing procedures. The different ways by which the image of the self is reproduced and modified show how interactions are ‘polycentric and stratified environment where people continuously need to observe norms’ (Blommaert 2007: 2) and such norms are presupposed as a part of the interpretative frame of the interaction. Face, then, is not only co-constituted in the interaction, but also constitutive of it.