Face-threatening and face-invading acts: Towards two pragmatic universals

Abstract

According to the foundational work by P. Brown and S. Levinson, some communicative acts intrinsically threaten the speaker’s and the hearer’s face. Therefore, when performing these ‘face-threatening acts’, speakers use strategies in order to minimize the face threat. The purpose of this paper is to support the idea that all speech acts, i.e., all utterances, inevitably affect both the speaker’s and the hearer’s face. This thesis leads us to the distinction between non-impolite and rude speech acts. Non-impolite speech acts, which are polite when involving at least one politeness strategy, always threaten the speaker’s and the hearer’s face. Rude speech acts always invade the hearer’s face and, consequently, the speaker’s face. This analysis enables us to suggest that there are two general principles that take part in verbal communication.