Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement

Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2078–2105

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Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement Robert B. Arundale * Department of Communication, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK 99775-5680, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 17 December 2009 Accepted 23 December 2009

Face Constituting Theory addresses the question ‘‘How do participants achieve face in everyday talk?’’ explaining face and facework as achieved by participants engaged in faceto-face communication in situated relationships. Outlining the theory involves first sketching the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication as a conceptualization of the achieving of meaning and action in interaction, and second conceptualizing face as a relational phenomenon at both culture-general and culture-specific levels. Using these conceptualizations, Face Constituting Theory explains face as participants’ interpretings of relational connectedness and separateness, conjointly co-constituted in talk/conduct-ininteraction. Face Constituting Theory adds to this explanation a new conceptualization of how of face interpretings are evaluated as threatening to, in stasis, or supportive of relationships, drawing into a single explanation the full range of observations on facework from outright face threat, through face maintenance, to outright face support. Consistent with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Face Constituting Theory is framed from the participant’s perspective, and applying the theory in examining the achievement of face in an instance of everyday interaction both illustrates the application of the new theory in research, and indicates how it is distinct from the approaches existing theories employ in studying face and facework. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Face Facework Communication Interaction Conversation Relationship

1. Introduction Face and facework have been a focus of research in language pragmatics since Brown and Levinson (1987) introduced Goffman’s (1955) concepts in 1978. This article outlines a new theory of face and facework that addresses the question ‘‘How do participants achieve face in everyday talk?’’ Face Constituting Theory is distinct from existing theories because it rests upon two radical shifts in conceptual framing. First, Face Constituting Theory employs a new theoretical model of human communication, the Conjoint Co-constituting Model (Arundale, 1999), whose conceptual commitments are incommensurate with those of the encoding/decoding models of communication pervasive in existing theories of face and facework (Arundale, 2008). This new model draws upon current theory in the study of human communication, as well as on research in conversation analysis, to explain the achieving of meaning and action in everyday talk and associated non-linguistic conduct. Second, Face Constituting Theory employs a new conceptualization of ‘face’ in terms of the relationship two or more persons create with one another in interaction, a conceptualization distinct from the understandings of face in terms of personcentered attributes like social identity, public self-image, or social wants that characterize existing theories (Arundale, 2006, 2009). This new conceptualization draws upon current theory and research in interpersonal communication in explaining

* Tel.: +1 907 474 6799; fax: +1 907 474 5858. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.12.021

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face as a relational and interactional phenomenon arising in everyday talk/conduct, as opposed to a person-centered attribute understood as determining the shape of an individual’s utterance. Because face arises in communicating, outlining Face Constituting Theory entails first outlining the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication in section 2. The model represents a radical shift in framing because it conceptualizes ‘interaction’ or ‘communication’ in the ‘strong’ or technical sense of a non-summative process arising in a single system of two or more interdependent persons, as opposed to the common ‘weak’ or ordinary sense of a summative process involving two separate systems, i.e., an independent encoder whose output becomes the input for an independent decoder. Face Constituting Theory is outlined in section 3, and represents a radical shift in framing not only because it conceptualizes face anew as the on-going, conjoint co-constituting of connection with and separation from others in relationships, but also because it conceptualizes this process as coordinate with the conjoint co-constituting of meaning and action in talk/conduct-in-interaction. Given these two radical shifts, Face Constituting Theory is distinct from existing theories in understanding face not as a psychological construct that is exogenous to language use, but as a dyadic accomplishment that is endogenous to using language because it is achieved as an integral part of the interaction among participants. Examining this new conceptualization in depth provides the basis for considering how the new theory of facework explains face threat, maintenance, and support within a single, integrative framework. Because one’s methodology need be consistent with one’s conceptualization, section 4 considers key issues in studying face as endogenous in interaction, and applies Face Constituting Theory in examining the interactional achieving and conjoint co-constituting of face in one instance of everyday talk/conduct. 2. The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication The first frame shift central to Face Constituting Theory is conceptualizing human interaction in the strong sense of interactional achievement, not in the weak sense of encoding something for another to decode. One of the most incisive, but hitherto unaddressed critiques of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness as facework is their own assessment that Social interaction is remarkable for its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it; this emergent character is not something for which our current theoretical models are well equipped. Workers in artificial intelligence have already detected a paradigm clash between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘interactionism’, and noted the failure of the former paradigm to account for interactional organization. . .; our own account suffers from the same dose of ‘cognitivism’. Work on interaction as a system thus remains a fundamental research priority, and the area from which improved conceptualizations of politeness are most likely to emerge. (1987:48) The cognitivism Brown and Levinson find problematic is one entailment of the conceptual commitments of ‘encoding/ decoding’ models of communication (Arundale, 2008:233–234), commitments that are retained in ‘‘current theoretical models’’ because, despite disclaimers, ‘communication’ continues to be conceptualized as one monadic individual’s encoding of meanings in a self-contained linguistic or non-linguistic unit act, in the presence of other monadic individuals, who recover the first individual’s meanings through decoding that unit act plus inferencing (Arundale and Good, 2002). The commitments of encoding/decoding models characterize communication only in the weak sense as the script or schema driven alternating of two independent individual’s producing of unit acts and recovering of meanings. Because no reciprocal conditionality is identified across the activities of the individuals, explanations of those activities reduce without remainder to the simple sum of the independent individual’s behaviors and/or cognitive states. The individuals are engaged in ‘joint’ activities (cf. Kidwell and Zimmerman, 2006:22), but only in the sense of the summative transfer of power between two meshed gears. Arundale (2008:243–246) argues that accounting for interactional organization as Brown and Levinson specify requires employing the distinct conceptual commitments of ‘interactional achievement’ models of communication that take the dyad rather than the individual as the minimum unit of analysis, and that conceptualize communication as a non-summative phenomenon involving two or more cognitively autonomous persons engaged in affording and constraining one another’s designing and interpreting of utterances and/or observable behaviors in sequence (cf. Arundale, 1999:125–126, 129; Kidwell and Zimmerman, 2006:7; Krippendorff, 2009:43). The commitments of interactional achievement models frame communication in the strong sense as two persons’ evolving, reciprocal co-creating of meanings and actions in ongoing address and uptake (Arundale and Good, 2002; Krippendorff, 2009:37–47). Identifying the reciprocal conditionality among the activities of the individuals involved enables explanations of the non-summative properties of those activities that characterize systems of interdependent individuals. The individuals forming the system are engaged not in joint, but in ‘conjoint’ activities in the sense that conjoining sodium and chlorine creates a compound whose properties resemble those of neither component. Interactional achievement models of communication are distinct from other models in that they both conceptualize and explain the non-summative properties of human interaction, properties that encoding/decoding models, for example, neither conceptualize (Arundale, 2008), nor are formally capable of explaining (Krippendorff, 1970). Non-summative properties of a system of two or more components arise when the state(s) of one component become(s) reciprocally linked to and conditional upon those of the other component(s) in space and/or time, that reciprocity generating properties either qualitatively different from (as in sodium chloride), or greater (or less) than those of the components (as in interaction effects

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apart from main effects in statistical inference using analysis of variance). Non-summative properties therefore cannot be reduced without remainder to the properties of the components. Critically, non-summative properties arise from the reciprocal conditionality of the components, not out of their simple co-presence, or from the unilateral effect of one component on another. Co-presence generates only summative aggregations of components, not systems, and aggregated unilateral effects can at best generate mutual dependence, as opposed to systemic interdependence (cf. Kenny, 1996; Krippendorff, 1970). Understandings of human interaction in the weak sense explain its processes and outcomes as summative phenomena, whereas understandings in the strong sense explain the non-summative phenomena empirically evident in activities as diverse as toddlers and caregivers interactionally achieving conjoint attention (Kidwell and Zimmerman, 2006), superior task performance in interactionally engaged dyads as compared to subjects who simply overhear their discourse (Schober and Clark, 1989), and the achievement both of turns at talk and of the myriad interpersonal actions participants create in everyday interaction (e.g., Heritage, 1984:231–292; Levinson, 1983:284–370). Both Clark (1996) and Sanders (1987) present interactional achievement models, but neither explains meaning and action as the nonsummative outcomes of participants’ affording and constraining of one another’s designing and interpreting of utterances and related behaviors in interaction. Another model is needed to explain face and facework as achieved in everyday talk. 2.1. A brief overview of conjoint co-constituting The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication (Arundale, 1999, 2008) addresses the question: ‘‘How do participants achieve meanings and actions in everyday talk?’’ By way of overview, consider what takes place in a three utterance conversation between Amy and Bob. As Amy designs and produces her first position utterance, she anticipates Bob’s interpreting of it. Her utterance, like any other, affords and constrains the possibilities for interpreting meaning and conversational action. Because she is cognitively autonomous from Bob, because meanings are not determinate (Arundale, 2008:244), and because (unlike an analyst) she cannot know what Bob’s second position utterance will be, Amy does not know just how Bob has interpreted her utterance until she interprets his second position utterance responsive to it (other turns may intervene before a responsive turn, hence the use of ‘position’ versus ‘turn’) (Schegloff, 1992b:1299–1301, 1317– 1318). Prior to that point, Amy’s projecting of Bob’s interpreting of her first position utterance remains provisional, because she does not know how it will be understood within the frame of their particular interaction (cf. Schegloff, 2006:147). In producing his second position utterance, Bob provides evidence of some aspects of his interpreting of Amy’s first utterance. Her interpreting of that evidence allows her either to confirm her provisional projecting if that interpreting appears consistent with her projecting, or to modify her provisional projecting if she finds inconsistency. At the point she has interpreted Bob’s second position utterance, Amy’s projecting of Bob’s interpreting of her first utterance, or her modification of it, becomes an operative interpreting because she now has evidence for how it has been understood within their particular conversation. If Amy is to add a third position utterance, she must in some manner take this operative interpreting into account, whether or not it is consistent with her own initial projecting. A provisional interpreting, then, is one not yet assessed in view of uptake, even though one may be certain about it, while an operative interpreting is one assessed in view of uptake, even though one might change it. In like manner, Bob’s second position utterance affords and constrains Amy’s options for construal, so that his projecting of Amy’s interpreting of his utterance also remains provisional until Amy’s third position utterance provides evidence of aspects of her interpreting of his second position utterance, and allows Bob to confirm or modify his projecting and thereby establish its operative interpreting. Crucially, in establishing his operative interpreting of his second position utterance, Bob gains evidence of how Amy understands it, which in turn allows him to confirm or modify his still provisional interpreting of Amy’s first position utterance, establishing its operative interpreting. As recipient of the first position utterance, then, Bob establishes its operative interpreting on the basis of Amy’s third position utterance, whereas Amy, as speaker of the first utterance, establishes her operative interpreting on the basis of Bob’s second position uptake. Heritage (1984:254–260; see also 2005:105; Levinson, 1983:326–333) argues that this three position framework comprises the basic ‘‘architecture’’ of human communication,1 with third (and sometimes fourth) position utterances being critical, as Schegloff (1992b:1300– 1303, 1321–1326) argues, because they are the last structurally provided positions for initiating repair of problematic understandings of first position utterances. Because they are cognitively autonomous, Amy and Bob form separate operative interpretings of her first position utterance, but at the point of the third position utterance their meanings and actions become reciprocally conditional and hence conjointly co-constituted. Because every utterance in a conversation is simultaneously a first, second, and third position utterance with respect to past or future utterances, as their talk/conduct continues Amy and Bob each form a sequence of operative interpretings that is thoroughly interdependent and entwined with the other’s sequence (cf. Heritage, 1984:259). Several matters of terminology must be addressed. ‘Interpreting’ is employed herein not only as a progressive verb to index the dynamic process of forming both meanings and conversational actions, but also and somewhat unusually as a gerund to emphasize that the momentary outcomes or products of interpreting talk/conduct-in-interaction are not fixed, but 1 Heritage (1984:254) refers to this three position framework as ‘‘an architecture of intersubjectivity.’’ The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication does not use the term ‘intersubjectivity’ because the common understanding of communication in terms of the commitments of encoding/ decoding models (Arundale, 2008) leads to a common, but intensely problematic interpreting of ‘intersubjectivity’ as ‘same’ or ‘shared’ meanings among participants (cf. section 2.3).

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continually evolving. As in section 2.2.2, interpreting is a dynamic, evolving cognitive process because the unfolding of a conversational sequence provides continually shifting affordances and constraints for one’s analyses of meanings and of conversational actions, and in turn for the array of sense-making processes that both rest on those analyses and form an essential part of interpreting: analyzing, inferring, comparing, synthesizing, evaluating, emoting, and so on. ‘Projecting’ is likewise used as a progressive and as a gerund to index one participant’s anticipating of the interpreting of his/her utterance likely to be formed by another participant, as in section 2.2.3. ‘Meanings’ are interpretings of what an utterance is about (i.e., ‘information’), whereas ‘actions’ are interpretings of what is getting done by the producing of utterances in specific circumstances (Schegloff, 1995:185–187). Lastly, although utterances or talk, together with the co-occurring observable behavior or conduct, comprise a single, integrated stream of human activity (Bavelas and Chovil, 2000; Thibault, 2008), for economy of expression the terms ‘utterance’ and ‘talk’ need henceforth be understood as inclusive of the associated ‘behavior’ and ‘conduct.’ 2.2. Theoretical principles The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication is a theoretical model whose three core principles are framed from the participant’s rather than from the analyst’s perspective. The principles are not injunctions to participants, but rather formal, general statements that are grounded in, summarize, and organize findings from research in human communication, conversation analysis, psycholinguistics, and language pragmatics. Together the principles not only model the ‘‘the procedures and expectations in terms of which [participants] produce their own behaviour and interpret the behaviour of others’’ as their utterances unfold in sequence (Heritage, 1984:241), but also explain how meaning and action are achieved in talk-in-interaction. Modifying the principles by inserting ‘constituent’ for ‘utterance’ both generalizes them and models the producing and comprehending of utterances themselves. Although space precludes further discussion, all three principles rest on the fundamental presumption that a sequence of utterances in talk-in-interaction arises in the co-participants’ interactionally achieving a sequence of turns at talking and/or behaving (Sacks et al., 1974; see Heritage, 1984:262–264; Levinson, 1983:293–303). The principles are presented here in summary, earlier versions having been considered elsewhere in greater depth (Arundale, 1999). 2.2.1. Adjacency in talk Schegloff (2007) indicates the centrality of adjacency in human communication: Among the most pervasively relevant features in the organization of talk-and-other-conduct-in-interaction is the relationship of adjacency or ‘nextness.’ The default relationship between components of most kinds of organization is that each should come next after the prior. In articulating a turn-constructional unit, each element—each word, for example— should come next after the one before; in fact at a smaller level of granularity, each syllable—indeed, each sound—should come next after the one before it. So also with the several turn-constructional units that compose a multi-unit turn; so also with the consecutive turns that compose a spate of talk; . . . etc. Moving from some element to a hearably-next-one with nothing intervening is the embodiment of, and the measure of progressivity. (2007:14–15) As speakers design and as recipients interpret utterances in sequence, they presume this sequential interdependence of utterances across adjacent turns. That adjacency may extend well backward and forward from the current utterance, though the immediately anterior and posterior utterances are normally the most salient. The Adjacent Placement Principle derives from Sacks’ (1992:554; Sacks et al., 1974:728) ‘‘fundamental ordering principle for conversation’’ (Heritage, 1984:261), and frames adjacency, nextness, or progressivity from the participants’ perspective: Unless the speaker indicates otherwise, recipients interpret the utterance currently being produced on the presumption that it is designed in view of the immediately prior utterance (and others that may have preceded it), and is grounds for designing the immediately subsequent utterance (and others that follow). Reciprocally, unless they indicate otherwise, speakers design the utterance currently being produced on the presumption that it will be interpreted in view of the immediately prior utterance (and others that may have preceded it), and is grounds for interpreting the immediately subsequent utterance (and others that follow). If the prior and subsequent utterances are turns allocated to another person in a turn-taking sequence (i.e., the talk is not a monologue), then the participants’ presuming and deploying of the Adjacent Placement Principle links one person’s designing or interpreting of the current utterance with the other person’s interpreting or designing of the prior or the subsequent utterance. It is in this reciprocal linking that each individual’s forming or ‘constituting’ of meanings and actions becomes entwined with that of the other person. 2.2.2. Recipient interpreting Returning to the overview, above, Amy interprets Bob’s second position utterance against the background of her evolving interpreting of their prior talk, and taking into account the expectations regarding meaning and action invoked during her designing and producing of her first position utterance. Those expectations include both her projecting of the interpreting Bob would formulate for her first position utterance, and her projecting of the uptake he would provide in his second position utterance. Because he has placed his utterance adjacent to hers, Amy presumes Bob designed that utterance to be interpretable in view of her prior utterance, and as evidencing particular meanings and performing particular actions

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(cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1300). Accordingly, Amy ascribes her provisional interpreting of his second position utterance to Bob as his meaning and action for his utterance, and holds him accountable for her interpreting (Heritage, 1984:106–110). Given that she presumes both adjacency and accountability, Amy assesses the consistency or the extent of adjacency between her provisional interpreting of Bob’s second position utterance and her provisional projecting of both his interpreting and his uptake of her first position utterance. Should she find consistency in meaning and action, Amy has at least some evidence that Bob did indeed interpret her first position utterance as she was projecting he would, hence she can take that interpreting as operative within their conversation. Finding consistency invokes an expectation that in designing her third position utterance, she can move the talk sequence forward. Should Amy find inconsistency or problems in adjacency in meaning and/or action between her provisional interpreting of Bob’s second position utterance, and her provisional projecting of his interpreting and uptake, she has evidence questioning the viability of her interpreting or her projecting (or both). If Amy takes her interpreting of Bob’s second position utterance as viable, her provisional projecting of his interpreting and uptake of her first position utterance is in question. Maintaining the adjacency relationship requires her to reconfigure her interpreting of her prior utterance, retroactively modifying that interpreting to be consistent with the interpreting Bob made evident in second position. In ascribing her reconfigured interpreting to Bob as the meaning and action he formed for her first utterance (and holding him accountable for it), Amy treats her modified interpreting of her own utterance as operative, invoking expectations that in designing her third position utterance, she can either move the sequence of talk forward, accepting this operative interpreting, or initiate a repair sequence, expecting to engender further change in that interpreting. Related changes in interpreting ensue if instead Amy takes her projecting of Bob’s interpreting of her first position utterance as viable (see Arundale, 2008:248). As Schegloff (2007:15) adds in explaining adjacency: ‘‘Each next element of such a progression can be inspected to find out how it reaffirms the understanding-so-far of what has preceded, or favors one or more of several such understandings that are being entertained, or how it requires reconfiguration of that understanding.’’ The Sequential Interpreting Principle summarizes these processes of recipient interpreting of utterances placed adjacent to one another in sequence: Recipients interpret the utterance currently being produced using both knowledge and expectations arising in designing and interpreting prior utterances; they ascribe their current interpreting to the producer of the utterance as the producer’s meaning or action, holding him/her accountable for it; they assess consistency between their current provisional interpreting and evolving prior interpreting, forming operative interpretings; and they invoke expectations for designing and interpreting subsequent utterances. The Sequential Interpreting Principle makes evident that in all cases, one’s assessing of the next utterance in sequence—what has been produced in uptake—has the potential to engender retroactive modifying of one’s interpreting of prior utterances. Retroactive modifying is one’s revising of a previously provisional interpreting in forming an operative interpreting, and although it is central to the processes of conversational repair (Schegloff, 1992b:1319), repair is an interactional achievement, whereas retroactive modifying is a cognitive process. The Principle makes apparent, as well, that one’s assessing of what is provided in uptake can also engender retroactive confirming, or determining that one’s previously provisional interpreting can be treated as operative (cf. Heritage, 1984:258; Schegloff, 1992b:1326, 1329, 1331). Retroactive confirming is an active process in one’s interpreting, just as is retroactive modifying, and is common in everyday talk-in-interaction because speakers have well-developed abilities for projecting recipients’ interpretings of the utterances they are designing for them. 2.2.3. Speaker designing As he anticipates his turn as speaker, Bob begins designing his second position utterance for his recipient, Amy, taking into account several factors: the expectations regarding meaning and action that were invoked during his provisional interpreting of her first position utterance; the interpretings he expects her to formulate given his personal projects; the uptake she will likely provide in her third position utterance; and the attributions he has made to her regarding both her evolving interpreting of their prior conversation(s), and her knowledge of resources for forming or constituting interpretings. Within this frame, Bob designs his utterance to be interpretable, that is, to be hearable, observable, or recognizable (Kidwell and Zimmerman, 2006) as evidencing particular meanings and as performing particular actions. Because he designs his contribution for her, Bob presumes both that Amy will ascribe to him the interpreting she forms as his meaning and action in producing the utterance, and that she will hold him accountable for her interpreting. Because he will be placing his utterance adjacent to hers, Bob presumes Amy will interpret it in view of her prior utterance. Given that he presumes both reflexive accountability and adjacency, Bob’s designing of his second position utterance involves projecting Amy’s interpreting of it as uptake to her first position utterance. That projecting involves complex inferences regarding the full scope of the sequential interpreting in which Amy will likely engage: her interpreting in view of the expectations invoked in designing her prior utterance, her ascribing of that interpreting to him, her assessing of consistency and forming of an operative interpreting, her invoking of expectations for subsequent utterances, and more (Arundale, 2008:247). Bob is in a position to begin to articulate the utterance once the design process is underway, but designing is a dynamic, evolving process, subject to change as it evolves. The Recipient Design Principle derives from Sacks et al.’s (1974:727) discussion of the multiple ways in which speakers shape their utterances for others, but frames this complex process from the participant’s perspective: Speakers frame an utterance to be produced on the basis of expectations arising in prior producing and interpreting, recipient meanings and actions to be engendered, and expectations regarding recipient uptake; they attribute to the future recipient certain knowledge of evolving interpretings and of resources and practices for interpreting; they presume the recipient will ascribe to him/her the interpreting the

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recipient formulates, and will hold him/her accountable for it; they anticipate the recipient’s interpreting, ascribing, assessing, and invoking in formulating meanings and actions for the utterance being designed; and they produce the utterance by selecting and articulating components. The Recipient Design Principle describes the planning and producing of utterances in talk, speakers being ‘‘specifically accountable for designing their utterances for the particular recipients they target’’ (Raymond, 2003:950). Fox (2008) examines a number of pragmatic, syntactic, lexical, and prosodic aspects of the speaker’s designing of utterances for recipients, processes that Arundale (2008) argues cannot be conceptualized productively in terms of (Gricean) speaker intentions. Like the processes of sequential interpreting, the processes of recipient design are not normally present in, although they are available to consciousness. 2.3. Conjoint co-constituting and interactional achievement The Sequential Interpreting Principle and the Recipient Design Principle describe an autonomous individual’s cognitive processing of the utterances produced by others and by themselves. The Adjacent Placement Principle describes the fundamental presumptions individuals employ in interpreting and designing utterances in sequence. Because they are framed from the participant’s perspective, the three principles enable careful examination of each participant’s assumptions and operations as they alternate in designing and interpreting each new utterance in sequence. The detail involved in such an analysis makes it less useful, however, for the present purpose of examining how the three principles explain the participants’ conjoint co-constituting of meaning and action for a given utterance. The brief analysis below is therefore not typical of research employing the Conjoint Co-constituting Model because it employs the principles only in broad outline, and adopts the perspective of the analyst who comprehends the final shape of a conversation, rather than of the participants as they incrementally achieve that shape. Consider, then, the following brief conversation ‘‘which occurs in a research organization just after the beginning of the year. Loes is the receptionist and keeper of supplies; Marty is a visiting researcher’’ (Schegloff, 1992b:1321): (1) 1.

Marty:

2.

Loes:

Loes, do you have a calendar, Yeah ((reaches for her desk calendar))

3.

Marty:

Do you have one that hangs on the wall?

4.

Loes:

Oh, you want one.

5.

Marty:

Yeah

Given the outcome of the conversation, the evidence of their meanings and actions that Marty and Loes provide for one another (and hence for the analyst) suggests that in designing utterance 1 for Loes as recipient, Marty is projecting that she will interpret it as a request to obtain a wall calendar for himself, although the utterance also affords interpreting as a request to use her desk calendar, and perhaps as asking if she possesses a calendar (cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1321–1322). Because he has no way of knowing just how Loes will interpret utterance 1, the interpreting that Marty is projecting at the moment he produces his utterance is provisional. The meaning and action Loes evidences in utterance 2 suggests that in interpreting utterance 1, Loes understands it as a request to use her desk calendar. Although her interpreting of utterance 1 is likewise provisional, Loes not only ascribes it to Marty as his meaning and action in having produced the utterance, and holds him accountable for it, but also takes her interpreting to be the grounds for designing her next adjacent utterance. The evidence provided by subsequent utterances suggests that in designing utterance 2 for Marty as recipient, Loes is projecting that in addressing the yes/no interrogative, and in reaching as if to provide her desk calendar for his use, Marty will interpret her utterance as responsive to utterance 1 as she has provisionally interpreted it. At the point she produces utterance 2, the interpreting Loes is projecting that Marty will form is also provisional. Because he assumes adjacency, Marty presumes utterance 2 is designed in view of utterance 1, and assesses the consistency between his interpreting of her second utterance and his still provisional projecting for his first utterance. If Marty were to find evidence that Loes’s interpreting of utterance 1 were consistent with his provisional projecting of it, that projecting would be retroactively confirmed. If he were to find evidence of inconsistency, Marty would have to retroactively modify his provisional projecting of utterance 1 in order to reestablish adjacency. The evidence from the utterances that follow suggests that Marty interprets Loes’s utterance 2 as compliance with a request to use her desk calendar. Because that interpreting is inconsistent with his provisional projecting that she would interpret utterance 1 as a request to obtain a wall calendar, Marty retroactively modifies his provisional projecting, reconfiguring his interpreting of utterance 1 as a request to use her calendar, thus reestablishing adjacency across the two utterances. At this point, what had been a provisional projecting of utterance 1 becomes an operative interpreting in that Marty has evidence of how Loes has interpreted it. Marty presumes this operative interpreting is the meaning and action Loes ascribes to him at this moment for utterance 1: he is reflexively accountable for that interpreting and employs it as grounds for designing his next adjacent utterance. In placing her utterance 2 adjacent to his utterance 1, then, Loes enables Marty’s co-constituting of an operative interpreting for utterance 1, the prefix ‘co-’ indexing that his psychological processes in constituting that operative interpreting have been afforded and constrained in part by the activities of another human being. Marty’s operative interpreting becomes conditional upon his interpreting of Loes’s utterance 2, but conjoint co-constituting is not yet involved because this conditionality is unilateral.

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The shape of the conversation as a whole provides evidence that in designing utterance 3, Marty is projecting that in asking her if she has a calendar that hangs on the wall, Loes will interpret his utterance both as specifying a wall calendar rather than a desk calendar, and by implication as clarifying the type of request he was projecting in designing utterance 1. Again, Marty’s projecting is provisional as he produces utterance 3. In assuming adjacency, Loes presumes utterance 3 is designed in view of utterance 2, and assesses the consistency between her interpreting of his third utterance and her still provisional interpreting of her second utterance. The latter utterances in the conversation provide evidence that Loes interprets Marty’s utterance 3 as indexing wall calendars, which is inconsistent with her provisional projecting that he would interpret her move to offer her desk calendar in utterance 2 as responsive to the request she provisionally interpreted him as making in designing utterance 1. The evidence of Loes’s utterance 4 suggests that she retroactively modifies her provisional projecting of utterance 2, in effect nullifying its meaning and action, and reconfigures her interpreting of utterance 1 as a request to obtain a wall calendar. At this point, what had been her provisional interpreting of utterance 1 becomes an operative interpreting in that Loes has evidence of how Marty was projecting she would interpret it. Loes ascribes this operative interpreting to Marty as his meaning and action for utterance 1, holds him accountable for that interpreting, and employs it as grounds for designing her next adjacent utterance. In placing his utterance 3 adjacent to her utterance 2, then, Marty enables Loes’s co-constituting of an operative interpreting for utterance 2 and in turn for utterance 1, but there is a very important difference between Loes’s placing utterance 2 adjacent to utterance 1, and Marty’s placing utterance 3 adjacent to utterance 2: the addition of a third utterance creates reciprocal conditionality between their operative interpretings of utterance 1. More specifically, and understood in terms of conjoint co-constituting across the basic three position architecture of communication, Marty’s placing of utterance 3 adjacent to utterance 2, following Loes’s placing of utterance 2 adjacent to utterance 1, does not create another unilateral conditionality. Instead, the addition of utterance 3 makes their operative interpretings of utterance 1 reciprocally conditional because Loes could not have co-constituted her interpreting of utterance 3, upon which her operative interpreting of utterance 1 is conditional, apart from Marty’s designing of utterance 3, that designing resting on his co-constituting of an interpreting of her utterance 2, upon which his operative interpreting of utterance 1 is conditional. At the point of utterance 3, then, the two have reciprocally afforded and constrained their interpretings of utterance 1, and their interpretings of it have become conjointly co-constituted, rather than independently co-constituted. Understood in terms of interactional achievement across the core two position unit of sequence organization in conversation, Marty’s operative interpreting of his first position utterance is interactionally achieved as Loes places her second position utterance adjacent to it. Loes’s operative interpreting of her second position utterance is likewise interactionally achieved as Marty produces his adjacent third position utterance. Loes’s operative interpreting of her second position utterance allows her, in turn, to form an operative interpreting of the first position utterance. But as above, there is a key distinction between the interactional achieving of Loes’s operative interpreting of her second position utterance and what might be said to be the ‘transitive’ interactional achieving of her operative interpreting of his first position utterance: whereas interactional achieving creates unilateral conditionality, the addition of the third position utterance creates reciprocal conditionality between Marty and Loes’s operative interpretings of the first position utterance. The conjoint co-constituting of two participant’s operative interpretings of a given utterance across the three position architecture of communication is therefore a non-summative outcome that involves the interactional achieving of operative interpretings across first and second positions, together with the interactional achieving of operative interpretings across second and third positions, but that is not a summative outcome reducible to those two independent interactional achievements. Space precludes detailed consideration of an example involving retroactive confirming, but the same three position architecture of communication is involved. That is, if Marty’s provisional projecting in designing utterance 1 were that Loes would interpret it as a request to use her desk calendar, and if she placed the same utterance 2 adjacent to it, his projecting would be retroactively confirmed as operative. Were he then respond to her utterance 2 with an utterance 3 that involved taking the proffered calendar from her, or perusing it were it placed before him, perhaps adding ‘‘Thanks,’’ her interpreting of utterance 1 would be retroactively confirmed as operative, as well, creating reciprocal conditionality. Viewed from a different perspective (Schegloff, 1992b:1326–1327), once participants have reached the third (or sometimes fourth) position utterance without repair having been initiated, their interpretings of a given first position utterance become ‘‘effectively ratified’’ or mutually operative. Accordingly, whether involving retroactive modifying, or more commonly retroactive confirming, the conjoint co-constituting of two individual’s separate yet reciprocally conditional operative meanings and actions for a given utterance across the three position architecture of communication, together with the turn-taking sequence on which it rests, are the fundamental non-summative outcomes of human interaction. As each new turn is achieved, the participant’s sequences of reciprocally conditional operative interpretings are extended, further entwining their interdependent meanings and actions. Taken together, the three principles of the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication explain the emergence of properties in talk ‘‘which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it’’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987:48). Returning briefly to conversation (1), notice that at the point Marty adds utterance 3, he and Loes have conjointly co-constituted different operative interpretings of utterance 1, his as a request to use her desk calendar, and hers as a request to obtain a wall calendar. Their operative interpretings are fully coordinated, reciprocally conditional, and therefore clearly ‘inter-subjective,’ but still different. Contrary to models based in encoding/decoding commitments, the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication neither expects nor assumes overlap in participant’s operative interpretings of any given utterance: misunderstanding emerges out of the very same processes of interactionally achieving and conjointly co-constituting operative interpretings as does understanding (Arundale, 2008). Overlap in interpreting is certainly possible,

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as is complementarity in meaning and action, but neither is a necessary outcome of human communication. The evidence suggests that as Loes designs utterance 4 she is projecting that Marty will interpret it as evidence of the change she has made interpreting utterance 1. In placing her utterance 4 adjacent to his utterance 3, Loes in effect deletes the operative interpreting Marty formed for utterance 1 when he interpreted her utterance 2, enabling him to formulate an new operative interpreting of utterance 1 as a request for a wall calendar, a change that he evidences in producing utterance 5. Only at the point of utterance 4 do the two of them conjointly co-constitute overlapping (though never identical) operative interpretings of the meaning and action of utterance 1. Notice also that sequential interpreting can occur apart from co-present interaction, as in watching television, or in overhearing others without their knowledge. Recipient designing likewise occurs without co-presence, as in speaking to an audio recorder, or in writing a newspaper advertisement. These are instances of co-constituting meaning and action, but they are not instances of interactional achievement because the sequencing of utterances is produced solely by the party who is the source of the talk, without interactional participation by the recipient. Such co-constituting is essential in human affairs, but because it involves only unilateral conditionality and only one person’s interpreting or designing, its outcomes are summative in that they reduce without remainder to the recipient’s or to the speaker’s cognitive processing. Conjoint co-constituting is distinct in that the sequencing of talk is produced by two or more person’s adjacent placement of utterances in sequence. Conjoint co-constituting involves reciprocal conditionality, entwines two person’s interpreting and designing processes, and produces the non-summative outcomes evident in human interaction. As the concept is used here (cf. Krippendorff, 1970, 2009:37–47), ‘communication’ is defined not as the co-constituting, but rather as the conjoint co-constituting of meaning and action. Models of language use framed within the commitments encoding/decoding models of communication cannot explain these non-summative phenomena (Arundale, 2008), and are incommensurate (Pearce, 1991) with interactional achievement models because they address only the unilateral effects of one person’s utterance on another person, not reciprocal conditionality, and because they are blind to the sequential organization of talk. Explanations which assume that the sequential organization of talk is guided or determined by strategies, scripts, schemas, or interchange units that participants bring to interaction from their socialization, and apply as the social context dictates (Arundale, 2009; Heritage, 1984:108–109, 287–290, 307–308), are likewise incommensurate with interactional achievement models. The Conjoint Co-constituting Model makes apparent that even the most routine sequences of talk must in each instance be achieved anew, utterance by utterance, given the ever present potential that the next adjacent utterance will engender retroactive modifying of the meanings and actions of prior utterances that neither participant could have anticipated (cf. Heritage, 1984:117–119). In short, in addressing the question ‘‘How do participants achieve meanings and actions in everyday talk?’’ the Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication represents a radical shift in framing from other models because meaning and action are explained as social, and specifically as interactional, rather than simply as cognitive in nature. That explanation lies at the core of Face Constituting Theory. 3. Face Constituting Theory The second of the two frame shifts central to Face Constituting Theory is conceptualizing face as a social phenomenon arising in the conjoint co-constituting of human relationships, rather than as an individual phenomenon involving personcentered attributes. More specifically, face is one key aspect of the relationship two or more persons conjointly co-constitute as they conjointly co-constitute meanings and actions in talk-in-interaction. Unlike existing theories, face is not a personcentered attribute such as a social want, one’s public self-image, or an aspect of one’s social identity understood to determine the design of one’s utterances. Face Constituting Theory understands face as arising out of Marty’s placing of utterance 3 adjacent to Loes’s utterance 2 in the sequence they are shaping together, not as the antecedent reason or cause for Marty’s designing utterance 3 in the way that he does. Face is a social phenomenon in that Marty and Loes achieve it conjointly, not a personal attribute of Marty or Loes as individuals. Existing theories of face are consistent with the Western tradition that privileges conceptions not only of the individual as a cognizing subject who perceives others as objects (Stewart, 1995b), but also of the social as the aggregate of two or more such individuals, and/or as a reified, corporate entity capable of acting or causing effects as do individuals (cf. Maynard and Wilson, 1980). In seeking a less culturally restricted, alternative conception of the individual and of the social, consider Krippendorff’s (2009:39–40) argument that from an epistemological perspective, identifying any human event as a social phenomenon rests on identifying two or more individuals linked in some relational state. In addition, from an ontological perspective (Krippendorff, 2009:112–130; Stewart, 1978) there is no point in the developmental span from procreation onward that individuals exist as human agents apart from the agency of other humans. In the human experience, then, not only are individuals qua individuals dependent upon the nexus that is the social, but also the social qua social is dependent on individuals in nexus. What is individual in nature and what is social in nature are fully interdependent, while at the same time, individual phenomena and social phenomena are distinct and functionally contradictory poles of human experience. This entwining of the individual with the social can be productively framed as a dialectic, not in the sense of a Hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996:30), but in the sense of Yin and Yang: two co-existing and opposing elements that each contain aspects of the other and that at points merge into or become one another. A Yin/Yang dialectic is neither a dualism nor a bipolar continuum in that it involves two phenomena ‘‘that function in incompatible ways such that each negates the other’’ (1996:8), but that are nevertheless unified because they function

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interdependently in an on-going, dynamic, and interactive manner. In human activity, social functioning is distinct from individual functioning in that social activities cannot be accomplished solely through the agency of one individual, but neither can they be accomplished in the absence of individuals. Individual functioning is distinct from social functioning in that individuals can carry on many activities in isolation from others, but their existence as individual agents capable of performing human activities has its basis in human sociality. The individual and the social are unified, definitionally because what is individual presupposes what is social, just as the opposite is true, and dynamically because individuals in interaction with one another generate the social, just as social interaction is generative of individuals (Arundale, 1999:128; Stewart, 1995b:27). 3.1. The core framework of Face Constituting Theory Face Constituting Theory addresses the question ‘‘How do participants achieve face in everyday talk?’’ Given its complexity, it will be useful to present the concepts and core structure of the theory, then to consider these concepts in greater depth, clarifying them by comparison, and lastly to extend the theory’s core framework. 3.1.1. Face as a relational phenomenon Face Constituting Theory draws directly on the individual/social dialectic in conceptualizing face anew. Within the Western framework that privileges Cartesian explanations in terms of individual phenomena, one is positioned to conceptualize face in terms of person-centered attributes, as in Goffman (1955). Arundale (2006, 2009) argues that Goffman’s conceptualization is social psychological in nature. It is psychological in that the explanation focuses on the perceptions one individual holds regarding how other individuals perceive him or her. It is social at the micro level in that the minimum social unit is understood as the aggregate of self plus other, and at the macro level in that societies are understood as an aggregate of individuals, each of whom has been socialized in ways that permit societies, understood as singular, corporate entities, to ‘‘mobilize their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters’’ (Goffman, 1955:231). Within the non-Western framework of the individual/social dialectic, however, an explanation can privilege neither the individual nor the social, which at base requires addressing phenomena at the level of the minimum social system of two interacting individuals. One is positioned then to conceptualize face in terms of relationships between persons (Arundale, 2006:200–203), where ‘relationship,’ is used in the ‘strong’ or technical sense of a system as defined by the non-summative properties that arise in the interdependencies among two or more individuals, rather than in the weak sense of the summative aggregate of independent individuals, as is characteristic of many theories of relationship (Arundale, in press). Such minimum social systems or relationships are arguably the basis of both human individuality and human sociality because the processes of communicating over time and space within networks comprised of dyadic systems explain, on one hand, how person-centered attributes like identity are created, maintained, and modified (e.g., Raymond and Heritage, 2006; cf. Arundale, 2006:200–201), and on the other hand, how societal systems (versus aggregates or corporate entities), together with societal norms, are socially constructed, sustained, and changed (e.g., Heritage, 1984:179–232, 309–311). These latter, complex issues beg discussion beyond that provided by Arundale (1999:140–142; cf. Thibault, 2008:324). Because it adopts the individual/social dialectic not only as the more theoretically and empirically defensible, but also as the more culture-general understanding of human individuality and sociality, Face Constituting Theory conceptualizes face at the level of the minimum social system of two interacting individuals, not at the level of individuals as independent systems. Face is thus a phenomenon arising in relationships between persons, where ‘relationships’ are understood in the strong sense as human systems defined by the non-summative properties arising among interdependent persons. 3.1.2. Face as relational connectedness and separateness Over four decades of theory and research in interpersonal communication have shown that human relationships are complex, multifaceted phenomena (Arundale, in press), hence key to refining Face Constituting Theory’s conceptualization of face as a relational phenomenon is specifying more precisely what aspects of relationships are involved. On the basis of their comprehensive, critical overview of that theory and research, Baxter and Montgomery (1996) argue in formulating their Relational Dialectics Theory that as persons engage in the back and forth of everyday communication, they form and sustain relationships that can be described productively using three interpersonal dialectics. Relationships are characterized by both openness with, and closedness from one’s partner, by both certainty about the relationship, and uncertainty about it, as well as by both connectedness with the other, and separateness from them. These three pairs of oppositional terms identify not personal needs or wants (1996:15), but rather properties, conditions, or states evinced in the interpersonal relationship that persons create and recreate as they communicate both at particular moments and across time. Baxter and Montgomery provide evidence for all three dialectics, in quite different types of relationships, but it is the dialectic of connectedness and separateness that is of primary interest here. In Baxter and Montgomery’s (1996:9) terms, connectedness and separateness form ‘‘a functional opposition in that the total autonomy of parties precludes their relational connection, just as total connection between parties precludes their individual autonomy.’’ Separateness in a relationship is always framed in view of connectedness and has implications for it, and vice versa, because each state involves and defines the other. Initiating interpersonal communication with an unknown other initiates the dialectical interplay of connectedness and separateness and initiates a new relationship. In established

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relationships, the interplay between connection and separation is always present, so that the relational partners are continually poised ‘‘between unity and differentiation’’ (1996:79), or in other words, poised between being a social system and being individual components, as opposed to being poised between the ends of a continuum. The tensional interplay of connectedness and separateness is fluid and dynamic, it is not resolvable, and it cannot be eliminated short of ceasing all communication. Relationships are neither driven by nor oriented toward achieving a synthesis of, maintaining a balance between, or canceling out the contradictory poles (1996:46–47). Connectedness and separateness is the principal or fundamental dialectic in relationships because no relationship exists except as two separate or differentiated individuals achieve some form of social connection or unity (1996:9). The dialectic is integral with the individual/social dialectic because achieving connectedness among individuals generates what is social, while achieving separateness within the social generates what is individual. Because the dialectic of connectedness and separateness is integral with the individual/social dialectic, and has demonstrable theoretical and empirical value in understanding and studying relationships, Face Constituting Theory specifies face more precisely as the achieving of both connection with and separation from other persons, where connection and separation form a dialectic. Baxter and Montgomery (1996) argue that openness/closedness and certainty/uncertainty are also important dialectics in relationships, but within Face Constituting Theory they are not aspects of face except as achieving them in a relationship implies connection/separation (1996:52). In conceptualizing face in terms of the connectedness/separateness dialectic, Face Constituting Theory draws on a comprehensive, integrative theory of relational communication that gains its conceptual specificity and empirical purchase from a highly developed tradition of theory and research on interpersonal communication (Arundale, in press). 3.1.3. Face as interactionally achieved in interactionally achieving meaning and action Conceptualizing face at the level of the minimum social system, that is, as a relational phenomenon, and more specifically as connectedness and separateness in relating with others, makes evident that achieving connection among individuals in interaction integrates them into a social system, while achieving separation in interaction within a social system differentiates among the individuals who are its components. Face is accordingly an interactional phenomenon, in addition to being a relational phenomenon (Arundale, 2006), this conceptualization privileging neither the social nor the individual poles of the dialectic because both are entailed. Among the many implications of conceptualizing face as an interactional phenomenon, perhaps the most central is that because humans interact only by means of utterances and/or behaviors, the practices of interaction through which persons achieve connection with others and separation from them must be integral with the practices of interaction through which they achieve meanings and actions. In other words, participants interactionally achieve and conjointly co-constitute interpretings of face, or relational connection/separation, as they interactionally achieve and conjointly co-constitute interpretings of meaning and of action. But interpretings of connection/separation are not inferences drawn from interpretings of meaning or action, nor are they otherwise derived from them, just as interpretings of action are neither inferences from nor derived from interpretings of meaning, or vice versa (cf. section 3.2.3). Particular interpretings of face are not linked to particular interpretings of meaning or of action, either, just as particular meanings are not linked to particular actions, or the reverse (cf. sections 4.1.2, 4.2.2). And interpretings of relational connection/separation may be achieved interactionally in the interactional achieving of any meaning and/or action, just as interpretings of meaning may be achieved interactionally in the interactional achieving of any action, and vice versa (cf. section 4.2.3). Another central implication, then, is that although the interactional achieving of relational connection/separation is integral with the interactional achieving of meaning and of action, interpretings of face, or of relational connection and separation, comprise a species or order of interpretings that is distinct from interpretings of meaning or of action, just as interpretings of meaning are integral with but distinct from interpretings of action (cf. Schegloff, 1997:505–506). In somewhat different terms, one accepts that meaning is omni-relevant in talk-in-interaction, with Schegloff (1995) arguing that action, too, is omni-relevant. Face Constituting Theory makes clear that face is likewise omni-relevant because all human interaction takes place between individuals who, in and through connecting and separating vis-a´-vis another participant, create or recreate the minimum social system that is a human relationship. Participants cannot achieve relational connection and separation except as they achieve meanings and actions, but they cannot achieve meanings and actions without also achieving connection and separation in a relationship. Analysts cannot find face in interaction without finding the achieving of meaning and action, but they also cannot find meaning and action without finding a human relationship, and hence face, achieved in interaction. Conceptualizing face as a person-centered attribute, together with framing communication in terms of the commitments of encoding/decoding models (Arundale, 2008), positions one to conceptualize face as exogenous to talk, or in other words, as an individual, cognitive factor that together with other such factors determines the design and deployment of certain utterances that a speaker produces for a recipient to comprehend. Goffman (1955), Brown and Levinson (1987:38), and others theorize from this position, thereby engendering the cognitivism and the inability to address interactional organization that Brown and Levinson find problematic (1987:48). In contrast, conceptualizing face as a relational phenomenon, together with framing communication in terms of an interactional achievement model (Arundale, 2008), positions one to conceptualize face as endogenous in talk-in-interaction, that is, as a conjoint, social outcome of two

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individual’s reciprocal affording and constraining of one another’s interpretings of a given utterance. Face Constituting Theory is constructed from this position, privileging neither the individual nor the social pole of the dialectic, and employing the Conjoint Co-constituting Model in explaining the non-summative characteristics of the interactional organization of talk. Conceptualizing face as endogenous to talk, rather than as exogenous to it, is the second radical shift in framing central to Face Constituting Theory, one of its primary consequences being the recognition that interpretings of face form an order of interpretings in human interaction that is integral with, but distinct from interpretings of meaning and action. Face Constituting Theory’s answer to the question ‘‘How do participants achieve face in everyday talk?’’ is that because face is both a relational and an interactional phenomenon, participants interactionally achieve and conjointly co-constitute both connection with and separation from others as they interactionally achieve and conjointly co-constitute meanings and actions in talk-in-interaction. The achieving of relational connection and separation is integral with the achieving of meaning and action, but interpretings of face comprise an order of interpretings distinct from interpretings of meaning or of action. Baxter and Montgomery (1996) and Duck (1995) represent researchers studying interpersonal communication who argue that relationships are phenomena which participants co-create and continually re-create in their everyday interaction. Robinson (2006:154) represents researchers in micro-sociology in arguing that ‘‘from its inception, conversation-analytic work has addressed itself to how practices of naturally occurring interaction are socially consequential, generally, and relevant to personal relationships, specifically.’’ Maynard and Zimmerman (1984:305) clarify that ‘‘rather than approaching relationships as a reality lying behind and influencing member’s face-to-face behavior, we can investigate them for how, in the course of time, they are accomplished within everyday interaction by various speaking practices’’ involved in the achieving of meaning and action. All of these scholars agree with Simmel (1950:26) that a relationship is ‘‘inseparable from the immediacy of interaction,’’ yet they also see achieving relating as distinct from achieving meaning or action in that they understand the practices of ‘doing relating’ to be of a different type than the practices of ‘doing topic initiation,’ ‘doing repair,’ or doing any of the myriad other practices involved in achieving meaning and action (cf. Robinson, 2006:154). 3.2. Examining the new conceptualization of face Glenn (2008: personal communication) asks if the term ‘face’ is perhaps too individualistic for this new conceptualization, and suggests a new metaphor is needed. A single metaphor for both integrating with and differentiating from others would be ideal, but until one emerges I will continue to use ‘face’ with this caveat: Face Constituting Theory’s conceptualization of face as a non-summative, relational phenomenon represents a marked departure from the conceptualization of face as a summative, person-centered attribute found in existing theories. Goffman (1955:213, fn. 1) appropriated a non-Western concept into Western sociology, and in so doing radically individualized it (Arundale, 2006:197). He noted that a person’s face is ‘‘something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events in the encounter’’ (Goffman, 1955:214), but his definition of face as one’s public selfimage prevented him from sustaining that interpretation beyond this one observation (Arundale, 2009:34–35). Section 4 provides an example of how one studies face, conceptualized as relational connection/separation, in the flow of utterances in everyday conversation. It remains in section 3.2 to examine this new conceptualization in more detail, and in section 3.3 to extend the core framework. Henceforth, ‘Face Constituting Theory’ will be indexed as ‘FCT.’ 3.2.1. What FCT offers researchers in language pragmatics and in conversation analysis To researchers studying relational phenomena in language pragmatics (as in Arundale, in press), FCT offers a conceptualization of relating in general, and of face in particular, that explains how face is achieved in the immediacy of everyday talk-in-interaction. Because it is not bound by the individualistic conceptualizations and encoding/decoding commitments of existing theories, this new conceptualization enables research on face that is consistent not only with current ‘constitutive’ (Robinson, 2006) and social constructionist theories of human relating, but also with current understandings of talk as the locally organized, interactional achievement of two or more participants. FCT also enables the conceptually consistent use of conversation analytic approaches in research on face and facework within language pragmatics, the assumptions regarding individuals and interaction that underlie existing theories being incommensurate with those underlying ethnomethodology and hence conversation analysis (Arundale, 2006, 2008; Heritage, 1984). To conversation analysts, FCT offers a conceptualization of relating, and especially of face as relational connection and separation, as endogenous to talk-in-interaction rather than as exogenous as in existing theories. Scholars like Heritage (1984), Lerner (1996), and Robinson (2006) do at times employ concepts drawn from Brown and Levinson (1987) and more frequently from Goffman (1955), but they do not engage these theories, the underlying assumptions regarding interaction and the social order being incommensurate with those of conversation analysis (see Arundale, [2006] re Brown and Levinson, and [2009] re Goffman). Given that inconsistency, the evidence these scholars adduce provides dubious empirical grounding for their interpretations using concepts drawn from these theories, and reciprocally, concepts from these theories are of dubious value in interpreting the evidence conversation analysis provides. FCT is framed within the commitments of interactional achievement models of communication, and within the framework of the ethnomethodological understanding of the social order (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Wilson, 1970), enabling conceptually consistent discussion of face and facework where useful in research in conversation analysis.

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To researchers in language pragmatics and in conversation analysis, FCT offers core concepts for a more culture-general conceptualization of face than in existing theories. Baxter and Montgomery (1996) argue that the fundamental, dynamic tension in relating that they index using the terms ‘connectedness’ and ‘separateness’ may also be indexed in different situations, in different relationships, and in different cultural groups using different terms or ‘voicings.’ Connectedness in relationships may be apparent in other circumstances as integration, interdependence, involvement, solidarity, association, congruence, closeness, and so on between relational partners. Because of the dialectical opposition, connectedness is always linked reflexively with relational separateness, which may be voiced in other situations, relationships, or cultures as differentiation, independence, detachment, autonomy, dissociation, divergence, distance, and so on (1996:30, 89–98). The connectedness/separateness dialectic is more culture-general (Arundale, 2006:121), then, not only because these alternate voicings encompass a broader range of culture-specific interpretings of face, but also because one finds among these voicings many of the dichotomies researchers have proposed as replacements for Brown and Levinson’s (1987) culture-specific conceptualizations of positive and negative face. The connection/separation dialectic is more culture-general, as well, in that it derives not from an emic conceptualization of face, but from a general theory that not only explains human relationships as achieved within the communication matrix that comprises any culture, but also anticipates and explains diverse types of relationships within, as well as across cultural groups. Arundale (2006) argues that Brown and Levinson’s (1987:62) definitions of ‘positive face’ as being approved of or appreciated by others, and of ‘negative face’ as being unimpeded by or autonomous from others, are viable, albeit simplified emic conceptualizations of connectedness and of separateness for many U. S. Americans, although they are not viable for most Japanese, for example. FCT offers the dialectic of connectedness and separateness a strong candidate for the more culture-general, etic level ‘‘core ideas’’ (1987:13) of face that Brown and Levinson suggest will be ‘‘subject to cultural specifications of many sorts.’’ That connection with and separation from others are core ideas regarding human relationships becomes apparent if one considers that the opposition exhausts the possibilities for characterizing the relative positioning of two persons in a dyadic system. Yet while cultural generality is necessary in a theory of face, it is not sufficient. Before using FCT in research within a given cultural group, one must undertake or employ ethnographically grounded research that establishes how persons in that group understand the dialectic of connectedness and separateness. In doing so, one re-specifies the culture-general conceptualization of face in terms of a culture-specific construal of both connection face and separation face. Within FCT, ‘culture’ is understood in the sense of a ‘community of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) of variable extent, the use of broad labels to identify cultures potentially masking the diversity among, and thus blocking consideration of the more local, internally coherent systems of interactional practices within which participant’s interpretings of connection and of separation arise. Arundale (2006) provides several examples of culture-specific construals, including Haugh’s (2005) argument that for persons in Japan, ‘connection face’ and ‘separation face’ can be understood using the culturally important concept of ba or ‘place.’ One key aspect of one’s relationships with others involves matters of uchi, or of the ‘place one belongs’ within one’s group. As they interactionally achieve uchi, Japanese persons also interactionally achieve tachiba, or the ‘place one stands’ in one’s group in rank or perspective. Uchi and tachiba are opposing, culture-specific understandings of connection face and separation face that are nevertheless unified dialectally because both are aspects of ba. Again, considering the community of practice within which a person or group interacts is necessary, because simply identifying someone as Japanese is not a sufficient argument that the uchi/tachiba construal applies in examining particular instances of talk. Different communities of practice within a broader cultural group might have different construals, individual persons may be ‘multi-cultural’ and access two or more construals, members of a given cultural group may utilize different construals in different situations, and so on. Examining a broader range of culture-specific construals would be valuable in further demonstrating why and how connection and separation are stronger candidates as culture-general core ideas of face than are Brown and Levinson’s (1987), but must await a fuller presentation of FCT. 3.2.2. Refining FCT’s conceptualization of face as relational and interactional FCT’s conceptualization of face is a marked departure from existing theories in part because face is understood as a relational phenomenon. Relational parties who achieve interpretings more focused on connection are understood to be achieving ‘connection face,’ whereas in achieving interpretings more focused on relational separation they are achieving ‘separation face.’ But the nature of Yin/Yang dialectics implies that face interpretings are never a matter of either connection face or separation face in isolation, and always a matter of both connection face and separation face together. An interpreting of connectedness is possible only relative to an interpreting of separateness, and vice versa (section 3.1.2). Because face is omni-relevant in relationships (section 3.1.3), analysts need always consider both connection face and separation face: one or the other may be more evident in a participant’s interpreting at any given point in talk, or both may be evident simultaneously because they mutually imply one another. Because connection face and separation face are relational phenomena and not personal needs (section 3.1.2), they are not synonymous with positive face and negative face, or with any of the corresponding dichotomies that have been proposed as replacements. Connection face and separation face are linked dialectically, whereas the dichotomies of positive face and negative face are conceptualized as dualisms, with the two opposing phenomena arrayed in one of three ways: as separate, discrete concepts (Brown and Levinson, 1987), as varying by degree (Terkourafi, 2007:333, fn. 18), or as the ends of a face continuum (O’Driscoll, 2007). Baxter and Montgomery (1996:10, 44–46) argue that employing such dualisms restricts one’s ability to conceptualize the complexities of relational phenomena, restrictions not entailed in dialectic framings. The direct

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implication is that if one were to substitute the dialectic of connection face and separation face for the dualism of positive face and negative face, or for one of its corresponding dichotomies, one would incur the conceptual and explanatory inconsistencies that arise from incommensurate theoretical frameworks (Arundale, 2006:207). FCT understands relationships as commencing when two persons encounter each other for the first time and initiate interaction, and as achieved anew in each subsequent encounter, whether as an active maintaining or as a modifying of the prior relationship (section 3.1.2). Two individuals may achieve more than one identifiable relationship in the same encounter or in different encounters, and hence may achieve more than one interpreting of face in a given interaction, or across a series of interactions. Because relationships are enacted in interaction, they are not continuous phenomena (Sigman, 1991). Understandings and expectations regarding a relationship remain when partners are not interacting, but understandings and expectations are not relationships, per se, because they are not situated achievings of relationship. Likewise, interpretings of face are achieved in interaction, and remain as understandings and expectations apart from the immediacy of interacting with a partner, but these are understandings and expectations regarding face interpretings, not situated achievings of relational connection and separation. Importantly, FCT understands face as an interpreting that individuals form regarding ‘our persons as both connected to and separate from one another’ (Arundale, 2006:207–208; 2009:46), rather than as an interpreting regarding ‘my own face’ or ‘your own face.’ That is, if one conceptualizes face as a person-centered attribute, and relationships in the weak sense of the summative aggregate of self plus other (section 3.1.1), as in existing theories, one is positioned to understand face as belonging to each individual, and hence as ‘self face’ and ‘other face.’ However, if one conceptualizes face as relational, and relationships in the strong sense of the non-summative properties arising in interaction between two or more individuals (cf. Baxter and Montgomery, 1996:42–43), one is positioned to understand face as belonging to the dyad or social unit, and hence as ‘our connection and separation’ or ‘our face.’ Clearly each individual has an operative interpreting of their connection with and separation from others at any given point in interaction, but because that interpreting is conjointly co-constituted, neither individual can be said to ‘own’ it because of its reciprocal conditionality. In short, because the simple sum of ‘self plus other’ does not comprise a relationship as understood in FCT, FCT does not employ the concepts of self face or other face. FCT’s conceptualization of face is also a marked departure from existing theories because face is understood as an interactional phenomenon. Face interpretings are conjointly co-constituted as participants conjointly co-constitute interpretings of meaning and action across the three position architecture of communication. In keeping with the Recipient Design Principle, then, a speaker who is designing an utterance is involved in projecting the interpreting of connection and separation the recipient will formulate, together with its uptake by that recipient, just as designing involves projecting the other’s interpretings of meaning and action, together with their uptake. As is the case for a speaker’s projecting of meaning and action, his/her projecting of face remains provisional until subsequent assessing engenders retroactive modifying or confirming. In keeping with the Sequential Interpreting Principle, assessing provides a recipient with an operative interpreting of face for a prior utterance, which he/she ascribes to its speaker as the speaker’s interpreting of relational connection and separation in having produced the utterance, and for which he/she holds the speaker accountable. In designing a next utterance the recipient must utilize this operative interpreting of face, even if it fails to correspond with his/her provisional projecting for his/her prior utterance. In short, as their talk evolves, participants conjointly co-constitute sequences of interdependent operative interpretings of separateness and connectedness in the relationship they are thereby (re)creating. Face is continually being formed and reformed as the participants achieve a sequence of utterances. In doing the conversational work involved in conjointly co-constituting interpretings of face, participants are engaged in ‘facework,’ and because they provide evidence of their interpretings of relational connection and separation to one another in their talk, those interpretings are available in part to the analyst. MacMartin et al. (2001) argue that face is a ‘member’s achievement,’ and that analysts need to examine it as such (section 4). At their least complex level, face interpretings are ‘direct,’ but they may also be ‘displaced,’ or ‘reflexive.’ Describing a face interpreting as direct indexes a participant’s own provisional or operative interpreting of face as interactionally achieved or conjointly co-constituted in talk with another participant. A displaced face interpreting is a participant’s interpreting of another participant’s direct face interpreting, and a reflexive face interpreting involves one participant forming an interpreting of the other participant’s interpreting of the first participant’s direct face interpreting. Two individuals on a first date are likely to be conjointly co-constituting face interpretings at all three levels. FCT’s explanation applies at all levels, but the face interpretings become more complicated. Another type of complexity arises because one’s ability to conjointly co-constitute interpretings in everyday conversation enables one to co-constitute interpretings when one is engaged in unilateral sequential interpreting or recipient design (section 2.3), as well as to constitute interpretings entirely apart from situated interaction. FCT thus provides a framework for understanding not only one’s co-constituting of the face interpretings of others when one observes them without engaging with them, or when one leaves a recorded message for them, but also one’s straightforward constituting or contemplating of face interpretings apart from engagement in talk-in-interaction. Space prevents consideration of either type of complexity, but both are essential, for example, in applying FCT in understanding emic conceptualizations of face, Haugh’s (2007a) discussion of Japanese practices revealing that face or kao is a concern both within and apart from actual face-to-face encounters (cf. Spencer-Oatey, 2007:651).

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3.2.3. FCT and existing theories of face and facework Because FCT’s conceptualization of face as a relational phenomenon represents a marked departure from existing theories that frame it as a person-centered attribute, it is useful to briefly consider several existing theories, with the goal not of engaging in critique, but of clarifying FCT by comparison. Because it is a relational phenomenon, and hence omni-relevant in talk-in-interaction (section 3.1.3), FCT conceptualizes face as an ‘issue’ that participants are continually addressing, rather than as a ‘problem’ that arises only at specific points of ritual disequilibrium or of threat to social wants, as in Goffman’s (1955) or Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theories. In developing his dramaturgical metaphor, Goffman recognized that participants saw their relative positioning as an on-going issue, but his explanation privileged the individual at expense of the social, and framed interaction only in the weak sense (section 3.1.1). For the most part, Davies and Harre´ (1990:56–57) avoid these limitations in developing their concept of positioning in the discursive production of selves, but in contrast to FCT they explain positioning in terms of learned, abstract ‘discursive practices’ or ‘story lines’ which determine participant’s actions in conversation. The term ‘relational’ is not employed in FCT in contrast to an ‘informational,’ ‘transactional,’ or ‘content’ function (Locher, 2008; see Arundale, 2006:202–203), or as identifying an imperative or motivation (Enfield, 2009) in language use. In FCT, face interpretings are a distinct order of interpretings from interpretings of meaning or of action (section 3.1.3), but all three orders are achieved in concert and need to be analyzed as such, rather than as isolated orders of interpreting achieved by separate means or for separate purposes (section 4.2). Enfield (2009:64) argues for a ‘relationship thinking’ approach in language pragmatics in which researchers ‘‘regard human relationships as a key locus of analysis,’’ examining both the concrete enactments of relationships and the cluster of cognitive capacities that support human sociality (cf. Levinson, 2006). His wide ranging overview seeks an integration of otherwise disparate concerns with human relating from ethnographic, linguistic, semiotic, social cognitive, social action, biological, and ‘relationship’ perspectives (the latter not including a large body of research in interpersonal communication, as in Arundale, in press). In contrast, and apart from the quite general Conjoint Co-constituting Model, FCT is a more narrowly focused theory that seeks to explain the achievement in interaction of a central dimension of human relating, the connection between and the separation among persons, or face. Because Enfield’s (2009) approach and FCT share a commitment to examining concrete, co-present interaction as the fundamental locus for understanding relationships, comparisons between them are inevitable. FCT’s more focused explanation cannot be subsumed within Enfield’s broader approach because the theoretical bases are not commensurate (Pearce, 1991). Although the complexities demand extended discussion, Enfield (2009:66) assumes utterances and associated behaviors are semiotic tools for ‘‘bringing about effects upon the mental states . . . of social associates.’’ His position rests on key commitments of encoding/decoding models of communication (Arundale, 2008), and is open to critiques of the semiotic model from the perspective of interactional achievement models of communication (Krippendorff, 2009:173–190; Stewart, 1995a).2 In addition, while FCT’s basis in the individual/social dialectic implies that it does not reduce all human phenomena to properties of interaction (Levinson, 2005; cf. Schegloff, 2005b), Enfield’s (2009:71) emphasis on social cognition and semiotics as theoretical bases for understanding relationships (contra Enfield, 2006:407–408) locates his explanation at the individual pole of the dialectic, without an evident theoretical basis as in FCT for explaining the achieving in interaction of ‘‘emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it’’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987:48), primary among these properties being the basic social systems that are human relationships. Unlike several existing theories, FCT does not conceptualize face in terms of self concept or social identity. Tracy (1990:210) originally argued that facework should encompass ‘‘the full range of identity concerns people have,’’ although in more fully examining the concept of identity (e.g., Locher, 2008; Spencer-Oatey, 2007) subsequent authors have more clearly delineated its relationship to face (e.g., Ting-Toomey, 2005). FCT conceptualizes both individuals and relationships as social constructions arising in and sustained in communication, but even if one conceptualizes identity as socially constructed in the strong sense of interactional achievement (which most theories do not, but see Raymond and Heritage, 2006), within FCT face is still not a matter of identity because a relationship is a phenomenon conceptualized in terms of a social system, whereas identity is a phenomenon conceptualized in terms of an individual system, that framing privileging the individual pole of the individual/social dialectic. Identity remains a person-centered attribute regardless of whether the aspect of identity involved is one’s identity as singular self, one’s identity as member of a collective, or one’s identity as a participant in a relationship. What is termed ‘relational identity’ (cf. Spencer-Oatey, 2007:641, 644) is not what is here termed ‘face.’ Face interpretings and facework are among the many factors involved in the social construction of identity (cf. Widdicombe, 1998), but FCT is not a theory of identity formation. Finally, within FCT face is not conceptualized as public self-image, as in Goffman (1955), because one’s view of the image others hold of oneself is a person-centered, social psychological construct that privileges the individual pole of the individual/social dialectic (Arundale, 2009). Face is also not understood as a social want, as in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) reframing of Goffman, because explanations of language use as determined by internal wants, needs, or motivations are Western conceptions that entail serious theoretical and methodological challenges (Bavelas, 1991). As part of their face interpretings, participants do make inferences regarding their relationships, as when their expectations are violated (Heritage, 1984), but FCT’s explanation is not framed in terms of inferential processes, whether regarding relationships, 2 The concept of an ‘interpreting’ in the Conjoint Co-constituting Model is entirely distinct from Enfield’s (2009) concept of an ‘interpretant,’ which he draws from Kockelman’s (2005) semiotics. As in the discussion of conversation (1) in section 2.3, the Conjoint Co-constituting Model would provide a very different analysis of Enfield’s (2009:70) roughly parallel conversation (3).

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whether derived from meaning or action (section 3.1.3), or whether arising from violations of expectations (cf. O’Driscoll, 2007). Face is not understood as ‘‘motivating or regulating how the inferential apparatus of the [Cooperative Principle] and the maxims will be applied to yield implicatures in context,’’ as in Terkourafi (2007:311), nor is it understood as in Brown and Levinson (1987:5–7) as a reason for the Gricean implicatures triggered by the presence in talk of various observer-defined redress strategies. FCT is neither a revision nor an extension of Brown and Levinson’s theory. It is a distinct theory based in radically different assumptions about humans as relational beings and about human interaction as conjoint co-constituting. 3.3. Evaluating face projectings and interpretings as threatening, in stasis, or supportive Unlike Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, in FCT participant’s projectings and interpretings of face, whether provisional or operative, are not understood to be intrinsically threatening (or supportive) (1987:24,65ff), nor as threatening by reference to group, societal, or cultural rankings of level of threat (1987:76ff). Instead, face threat, face stasis (no change in face), and face support are conceptualized as evaluations that participants make of the projectings or interpretings of face that arise as they design or interpret utterances (cf. Eelen, 2001:109–113). More specifically, as speakers are projecting recipient interpreting, and as recipients are interpreting current utterances and assessing consistency with their prior interpreting, they are engaging in a separate process of evaluating their provisional or operative interpretings of connectedness and separateness as threatening, in stasis, or supportive of the relationship they are (re)creating. Evaluating interpretings of face depends upon and occurs along with the processes of utterance interpreting, but is separate from them because the evaluating process operates on the outcomes of interpreting. To researchers in language pragmatics who study face and facework, FCT offers an explanation of face threat and face support lacking in Brown and Levinson (1987), and identifies face stasis as a new mode of maintaining face. Evaluating face projectings or interpretings as threatening, in stasis, or supportive involves three different interpretings. First, one’s projected/interpreted face is one’s projected interpreting during recipient design, or one’s interpreting of the utterance currently being produced, with regard to the extent of both connectedness with and separateness from the other person. It is this projecting or interpreting of face that is the focus of the speaker’s or the recipient’s evaluating of threat, stasis, or support. The projected/interpreted face remains provisional until assessing engenders retroactive modifying or confirming. Both speaker and recipient assume that the recipient will ascribe the projected/interpreted face to the speaker as his/her interpreting of relational connection and separation in having produced the utterance, and will consider the speaker accountable for it. Second, one’s evolving face interpreting is one’s evolving interpreting of the extent of both connectedness and separateness that characterize the relationship with this particular person, up to the current point in the interaction. This interpreting involves not only one’s current understanding of the long term evolution of connectedness and separateness in the relationship, but also one’s current interpreting of face as conjointly co-constituted across the prior utterances in the present conversation, right up to the current utterance. The evolving face interpreting is the basic reference point in evaluating face threat, stasis, or support because it is anchored in the relationship’s history to the present moment, and represents one’s understanding of the extent of both connectedness and separateness that characterize the relationship at the point of each new utterance. Third, one’s contextual face interpreting is one’s expectation for the interpreting of connectedness with and separateness from the other person that applies in the current context, as that context has been invoked or brought into play at the present moment by the participants in the conversation (Schegloff, 1992a). The contextual face interpreting may involve an expectation that one’s current evolving face interpreting will apply, but may involve quite different expectations, as well. Expectations for contextual face interpreting are seldom overt, arise over the course of one’s experience with others, and may be one’s own unique expectations, or shared with sets of others ranging in size from one other person to an entire society, the latter being normative expectations. All three interpretings of face are required to explain not only the complexity of participants’ evaluations of face interpretings, but also the full range of these evaluations from threat, through stasis, to support. It remains for future investigation to characterize the nature of the psychological processing participants engage in as they employ these three face interpretings in evaluating threat, stasis, and support. Absent that research, FCT’s evaluative model accounts for participant evaluations of face interpretings without claiming that the model represents the psychological processing involved. Central to FCT’s evaluative model is the individual participant’s comparison between the ‘situated shift’ and the ‘proffered shift’ in connectedness and/or in separateness. The situated shift at the current point in talk is the difference in extent of connectedness and/or in the extent of separateness between one’s contextual face interpreting and one’s evolving face interpreting. More specifically, any difference in connectedness and/or in separateness between the contextual face interpreting and the reference point provided by the evolving face interpreting represents the shift in face interpreting owing to the situation currently invoked. If the extent of connection and/or separation for the contextual face is currently the same as for the evolving face, there is no situated shift. If in a given situation one’s contextual face interpreting involves a lower extent of connectedness than one’s evolving face interpreting, the situated shift is one of reduced connection or situated divergence. If a higher extent of connectedness were to apply, the situated shift would be one of increased connection or situated convergence. The proffered shift at the current point in talk is the difference in extent of connectedness and/or in extent of separateness between one’s projected/interpreted face and one’s evolving face interpreting. In this case, any difference in

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connectedness and/or in separateness between the projected/interpreted face and the reference point provided by the evolving face interpreting represents the shift in face interpreting owing to the utterance the speaker has proffered in the conversation. If the extent of connection and/or separation for the projected/interpreted face is the same for as the evolving face, there is no proffered shift. If one’s interpreting of another’s utterance involves a higher extent of separateness than one’s evolving face interpreting, the proffered shift is one of increased separateness or proffered divergence. Should a lower extent of separateness be offered, the proffered shift would be one of reduced separateness or proffered convergence. Evaluating face interpretings as in stasis, as supportive, or as threatening involves comparing the situated shift with the proffered shift, and a straightforward example will prove helpful. Assume that part of the evolving face interpreting for two British or American academic colleagues includes interpretings of moderate connection in using first names with one another while carrying out their routine duties. The two are presently attending a conference in another country, and prior conversation has invoked a formal context, such that colleague A’s expectations for contextual face interpreting involve lower connectedness and/or higher separateness than would otherwise characterize his/her evolving face interpreting with colleague B. Presume then that colleague A has just been introduced by colleague B to a third person whom A has not previously encountered. Stasis: If the situated shift and the proffered shift involve neither convergence nor divergence, as when colleague B uses A’s first name in going about their routine duties, colleague A’s interpreted face is evaluated as in stasis, or in other words, A evaluates their relationship as neither threatened nor supported. More specifically, A evaluates face as in stasis because in forming an interpreting of face in comprehending B’s use of A’s first name, both A’s interpreted face and his/ her contextual face interpreting involve no shift in connection and/or separation from his/her evolving face interpreting. As in section 3.2.3, face is omni-relevant in talk in that all interaction creates or recreates the minimum social system that is a relationship. Face is an on-going issue of relative positioning that participants continually address, even when that positioning involves no change whatsoever. Face stasis is central in everyday language use, but seldom acknowledged or examined because it has not been conceptualized as an evaluation actively constructed in talk-ininteraction. FCT breaks with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) treatment of face maintenance as the balancing of threat with support by identifying and explaining stasis face maintenance, both making this new mode of maintenance visible and providing a theoretical framework for research. Stasis face maintenance appears, for example, in the everyday use of formal and familiar second person pronouns in central European languages, in the normal, smooth sequencing of turns in conversation (cf. 1987:232–233), in the regular use of formulaic utterances, and in wakimae usage in Japanese (Ide, 1989). Support: If the situated shift involves convergence or divergence, and the proffered shift involves the same, one’s projected/interpreted face interpreting for the current utterance is evaluated as supportive of the relationship. That is, if colleague B introduces A using his/her title and last name, and A understands this proffered shift as involving divergence with regard to A’s evolving face interpreting, then because the situated shift involves a similar divergence, colleague A evaluates his/her interpreted face as supportive of their relationship. More specifically, face interpretings are evaluated as supportive as long as the proffered shift in separateness and/or in connectedness is less than or equal to the situated shift. Maximum support occurs when the proffered shift equals the situated shift, one consequence being that if the proffered shift exceeds the situated shift, the projected/interpreted face may be evaluated as threatening. If there is no proffered shift, but one sees convergence or divergence as characterizing the situated shift, the speaker may be seen as inattentive, i.e., ‘he/she just doesn’t think about our relationship.’ FCT departs from Brown and Levinson’s (1987) treatment of redress by separating consideration of face support from consideration of face threat, therein acknowledging face support as a broader phenomenon to be studied in its own right. Like face stasis, face support is central in everyday language use, as is apparent in research on supportive interaction in interpersonal communication (Burleson and McGeorge, 2002). FCT provides a theoretical framework for integrating this work into new research on face support in language pragmatics. Threat: The remaining comparisons of convergence or divergence for the situated shift, with convergence or divergence for the proffered shift, all result in the projected/interpreted face for the current utterance being evaluated as threatening, although the various comparisons are not equally threatening to the relationship the persons have (re)created. If colleague B introduces A using his/her first and last name, without title, and A understands this proffered shift as involving convergence with regard to A’s evolving face interpreting, whereas the situated shift involves divergence, colleague A evaluates his/her interpreted face as threatening to their relationship in some degree. In other cases where the situated shift involves only slight convergence (as in an initial business encounter), and strong convergence is proffered, the evaluation as threatening may involve too much connection, i.e., ‘too much, too soon.’ Should the situated shift involve mild divergence, or mild convergence (as in waiting in a queue), and the proffered shift is strong divergence (someone jumps the queue), the evaluation as threatening might involve too much separation, i.e., ‘rudeness’ or ‘aggravation.’ FCT explains outright face aggravation in the absence of support (as well as outright face support in the absence of threat) because unlike Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, it explains face support independently of face threat. FCT provides the bases for continued research on face threat within an integrated theory of facework, rather than apart from same as in recent research on impolite language use (Bousfeld, 2008; Culpeper, 1996). These simple examples all focus on colleague A’s face interpreting, but as B is projecting A’s face interpretings in designing his/her utterance, B is also projecting the evaluations of face threat, stasis, or support that both colleague A and the third

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person are likely to form (section 3.2.2). Evaluations of face interpretings as threatening may arise apart from evaluations as supportive, but they may also arise in conjunction, as in designing and interpreting responses to compliments (cf. Pomerantz, 1978). FCT’s evaluative model is complex because the evaluating of any given face projecting or interpreting involves relational, interactional, and contextual factors, and because there is no necessary link between convergence and support or between divergence and threat. That is, if the situated shift involves divergence, as in a divorce proceeding, a proffered shift involving convergence would be evaluated as threatening to the current relationship, whereas if the situated shift involves divergence, as when another person engages in self-deprecation, a proffered shift involving divergence would likely be seen as supportive (cf. Pomerantz, 1984). Note that within FCT, evaluations of face interpretings are not evaluations of individual participants as persons. They are evaluations of threat to, stasis in, or support for the relationship between the participants. The individual/social dialectic makes apparent, however, that evaluations of relationships have implications for the persons who have (re)created them, so that in evaluating their relationship as threatened or supported, participants may also perceive their own or another’s person as threatened or supported. In addition, within FCT face ‘gain’ and face ‘loss’ are not viable theoretical constructs. Gaining and losing face are complex emic conceptualizations (cf. Haugh, 2007a:664) involving economic metaphors that equate face with money or goods. FCT could be employed in explaining change over time in face interpretings and evaluations, but here again there is no necessary link between increased connection over time and gain or support, nor between increased separation and loss or threat. Note also that within FCT power and social distance are not exogenous social factors used in evaluating level of threat, as in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) account. Power and social distance are conceptualized instead as conjointly co-constituted in specific relationships, and as matters of contextual face interpretings brought into play by the participants (Arundale, 2006:208). Over time they may become matters of evolving face interpretings, as well. Finally, within FCT face is understood as omni-relevant, rather than as relevant only when it is threatened, obviating the need to posit a fictional ‘virtual offense’ in order to explain the ubiquity of facework in everyday talk (Brown and Levinson, 1987:1–2). This overview of FCT’s model of evaluating threat, stasis, and support describes face in the culture-general terms of ‘connectedness’ and ‘separateness.’ One consequence is that the discussion seems curiously abstract and neutral, quite unlike the concrete and valenced evaluating of threat or support for relationships that is familiar in everyday talk. Reinterpreting connectedness and separateness in culture-specific terms like being appreciated by or being autonomous from others would result in a less abstract and more familiar discussion, but would restrict the explanation of facework to U.S. Americans. The conjoint co-constituting of face and facework is emotionally and morally laden, but examining these complex issues with the care demanded lies beyond the scope of this paper. 4. Using Face Constituting Theory in research Sound research requires that the assumptions basic to one’s methodology be arguably consistent with the assumptions basic to one’s theoretical framework. If they are not, the data one gathers and the analyses one conducts produce evidence that is inconsistent with the premises of one’s theory, and hence are incapable of providing empirical grounding for one’s interpretings in terms of the theory (section 3.2.1; Krippendorff, 1970). FCT explains how participants achieve face, or relational connectedness and separateness, in everyday interaction, the key theoretical assumptions related to methodology being, first, that participants themselves achieve face in their talk (section 2.2), and second, that both interaction (section 2) and relationships (section 3.1.1) are conceptualized in the strong sense as non-summative phenomena. Any methodology that can be argued to produce not only evidence that the analyst’s understandings of what the participants’ achieved is consonant with what the participants themselves achieved (Wilson, 1970), but also evidence of the non-summative properties of interaction and of relating (Krippendorff, 1970), would be consistent with FCT. At present, the most fully developed methodological approach meeting these criteria is conversation analysis, hence its use here in examining how FCT is applied in research. Analyses of face and facework lie outside the core research program of conversation analysis, but within the scope of research in language pragmatics informed by its findings and methodology (Arundale, 2005; cf. Schegloff, 2005a:474–475). 4.1. Analyst’s and participant’s perspectives on face Much research on facework employs the common method in objectivist social psychology of ‘observer coding’ of interaction: a category system is established in advance on the basis of theory or research, and the analyst decides which category applies to each utterance, without adducing evidence regarding what the participants themselves achieved in their talk. Goffman (1955) determined whether an actor’s move was a face-threatening ‘‘challenge,’’ or a face-saving ‘‘offering,’’ and Brown and Levinson (1987) adopt the same stance in categorizing face threats and redress strategies. Given its roots in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984), two central principles in conversation analysis are that analysts not only ground their understandings in publicly observable participant utterances, but also provide evidence that the phenomena they identify are instrumental in the participants’ interactional achievements in talk. Apart from evidence that the analyst’s understanding is consonant with what the participants achieved, analyses of talk become a matter of the analyst imposing his/her understandings on the participants (cf. MacMartin et al., 2001).

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4.1.1. Participant orientation and procedural consequentiality One provides evidence of what the participants’ achieved by demonstrating both ‘participant orientation’ to and ‘procedural consequentiality’ of a phenomenon argued to influence or to arise in talk, the basis for that demonstration being the evidence the participants themselves provide in the process of ‘displaying’ for one another their interpreting of the other’s talk (Schegloff, 1991:50–53).3 Those interpretings are evidenced in each participant’s uptake of the other’s prior talk, that evidence being available to the analyst, as well, although he/she cannot reconstruct from it all aspects of the participant’s interpretings (Heritage, 1984:260). The evidence provided by participant uptake is the central warrant in the analyst’s argument that his/her interpreting encompasses or is viable with respect to what the participants’ interactionally achieved in the moment of talk. Because participants themselves are not necessarily conscious of the interpretings for which they provide evidence, demonstrating participant orientation and procedural consequentiality does not involve questioning participants about those interpretings (Schegloff, 1996:173, fn. 6). Instead, the analyst examines specific instances of actual talk, and argues that his/her understanding is consonant with the participants’ achieving by (a) formulating or characterizing the phenomenon of interest as influential in or as arising in talk-in-interaction; (b) demonstrating from the details of each specific instance of talk that the participants are oriented to the phenomenon in that at the moment of talk it is implicated in or ‘‘relevant for producing and interpreting conduct in the interaction’’ (Schegloff, 1991:51, 65); and (c) demonstrating from the details of the talk that the phenomenon is consequential in ‘‘how the interaction proceeded in the way in which it did, how it came to have the trajectory, the direction, the shape that it ended up having’’ (1991:53, emphasis added). Schegloff (1991:64–66) maintains that when talk is an object of study in its own right, demonstrating participant orientation and procedural consequentiality is essential in any argument that a phenomenon exogenous to that talk (e.g., a participant attribute, context, or social structure) is influential in or arises in talk-in-interaction. What has not been as clearly articulated in conversation analysis is that if these three requirements apply to exogenous phenomena, they must also apply to phenomena understood to be endogenous to the achieving of talk, among these being relationships (e.g., Maynard and Zimmerman, 1984; Robinson, 2006) and face (e.g., Lerner, 1996).4 Given that an endogenous phenomenon is one whose achieving in interaction is integral or coordinate with the achieving of meaning and action, but that comprises an order of interpreting distinct from interpretings of meaning and action (section 3.1.3), the analyst’s argument that his/her understanding encompasses the participants’ achieving becomes more complex: he/she must demonstrate participant orientation and procedural consequentiality not only for action and for meaning, but also for the endogenous phenomenon. Arguing that the analyst’s understanding of an endogenous phenomenon is consonant with the participant’s understandings involves these four procedures (cf. Arundale, in press): (1) formulating the endogenous phenomenon as interactionally achieved in interactionally achieving meaning and action, not only conceptually in view of alternative formulations, but also operationally in the specific instances of talk being examined; (2) demonstrating for each specific instance of talk that the participants are oriented to or engaged in achieving the meaning(s), the action(s), and the phenomenon being examined; (3) demonstrating for each specific instance that the meaning(s), the action(s), and the phenomenon are consequential in the procedural producing and unfolding of the sequence of talk; and as necessary, (4) arguing for any generalizing of (2) and (3) from the specific instances of talk examined to other talk not examined, including both providing an account of the procedural characteristics of the production of talk that provide for its ‘‘recognizability’’ (Schegloff, 1996:173) as the meaning(s), action(s), and phenomenon being examined, as well as ‘‘testing the claim via confrontation of problematic instances and apparent ‘deviant’ cases, if possible’’ (1996:172). In examining the ‘‘complainability’’ of conversational actions, Schegloff (2005a:474) argues that ‘‘It is not enough for analysts to suppose that the parties, ‘can infer it from the context or observe or hear it happening’; what is needed is not supposition, but analysis of the data that ground such a claim in the observable conduct of the parties.’’ The same is true for endogenous phenomena like relational connection and separation, or face. Despite the considerable attention conversation analysts devote to the latter three of the four procedures, the first procedure is the most critical in research on an endogenous phenomenon. In the absence of a formulation of the phenomenon as interactionally achieved, both conceptually and operationally, the latter three procedures are simply moot because they constitute an analytic framework for generating evidence regarding what participants have interactionally achieved. Providing an operational formulation (procedure 1), and demonstrating participant orientation (procedure 2) and procedural consequentiality (procedure 3) must be accomplished anew for each specific instance of talk examined, even if researchers have provided a more general account of recognizability (procedure 4), because what participants achieve in the moment of interaction is their own, new sequence of talk, even if that sequence recreates a familiar pattern. One consequence is that for practices or forms previously argued to be implicated in the achieving of a given meaning, action, or 3 These are sometimes referred to, respectively as ‘relevance to participants’ and ‘procedural relevance.’’ I used the latter term in earlier unpublished work. 4 In earlier unpublished work I referred to this application of the three requirements as demonstrating ‘interpretative relevance.’ That usage is misleading.

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endogenous phenomenon, the analyst needs either to establish that they are implicated in the same way in each new instance of talk, or to provide a new analysis (cf. Schegloff, 1991:62). Conversation analysts employ a particular mode of arguing that participants orient to an action and that it is consequential in particular instances of their talk. Parallel modes of argument are possible within the frameworks of other analytic methods that produce evidence of the non-summative properties of interaction, the conversation analytic mode serving as a point of reference given the primacy it accords to talkin-interaction as the source of evidence (Schegloff, 2005b). In demonstrating participant orientation and procedural consequentiality for an endogenous phenomenon such as relationships or face, an analyst will likely draw on the same normative sequential procedures and expectations in talk that are employed in demonstrating participant orientation and procedural consequentiality for conversational action (Heritage, 1984:106–115, 241), but may also draw on features of the situational context currently invoked by the participants in their talk (e.g., Schegloff, 1992a:195–198), aspects of the currently invoked identity of the participants (e.g., Widdicombe, 1998), or the history of the participants’ interaction both prior to and within the talk being examined (e.g., Schegloff, 1992a:199– 214). These resources are important because in arguing that the analyst’s understanding is viable with regard to the participants’ achieving, the analyst must take into consideration not only the situational specificity of relationships, because they are always situated accomplishments (1997:538–539), but also the particularity of the persons involved, because individual differences may always be factors in relationships (e.g., Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997). Using these additional resources poses challenges, as for example in demonstrating the relevance to interaction of situational norms within a given community of practice (as in Ruhi, 2010), in the constraints imposed by limited evidence regarding the participants and their specific circumstances (cf. Pomerantz, 2005), or in identifying resources that may not be normative, in that if they are patterned at all, the ‘norms’ may exist only for a particular set of participants. Having addressed procedures 2 and 3, the analyst may be in a position to generalize his/her findings from the talk examined to talk not examined, as in procedure 4. The challenge in arguing any such generalization beyond the particular situations and participants examined is that both across dyads, and within and across social and cultural groups, even the most highly typified forms of relationships have myriad instantiations. 4.1.2. Finding face in talk What is needed, then, if an analyst is to use FCT in finding face in a given instance of everyday talk, and to argue that what he/she finds is consonant with what the participants themselves achieved in their interaction? Addressing procedure 1 requires formulating face both conceptually and operationally. Section 3 provides the conceptual formulation, but the operational formulation involves two steps. First, arguing for the viability of any alternative voicing of connection and separation (e.g., interdependence and independence), and/or of the particular cultural construal (e.g., uchi and tachiba) one is employing (section 3.2.1). Second, arguing how the achieving of relational connection and/or separation articulates with the achieving of particular meanings and actions in the specific instances of talk examined. This second step is important because achieving agreement in meaning, or alignment in action, for example, are often presumed to articulate with achieving connection, although there is no necessary linkage between any given conversational action and connection or separation. Although these presumed articulations arise regularly in conversation, they are context-sensitive and must be argued on a case-by-case or even utterance-by-utterance basis. That there are no necessary articulations is one reason why interpretings of face are an order of interpretings distinct from interpretings of meaning and of action (section 3.1.3). Addressing procedure 2 (participant orientation) requires demonstrating that in deploying particular conversational practices in a specific situation, the participants themselves are achieving connection and/or separation in their relationship, coordinate with achieving particular meanings and actions. Addressing procedure 3 (procedural consequentiality) requires demonstrating that in deploying these particular practices, the participants’ achieving of connection and/or separation, integral with their achieving of particular meanings and actions, is implicated in specifiable ways in the sequential organization of the interaction. Addressing procedure 4 requires examining multiple instances of deploying these practices in achieving face, meaning, and action in order to characterize the procedural features of that achieving that can be expected to appear elsewhere in everyday talk. Section 4.2 illustrates procedures 1, 2, and 3, only touching on procedure 4 because it demands more extensive analysis than is possible here. An analysis of threat, stasis, or support using FCT must also await a more extended presentation of the theory, but see Haugh (2010). Lerner (1996) finds face in the practices of anticipatory completion of one person’s utterance by another. Among the theoretical and vernacular alternatives, he draws directly on Goffman (1955), arguing that because ‘‘face is recognizable as an expression of self, then one way to capture face in the act is by locating the relevance of self (and other) in the opportunities to participate furnished by various aspects of the organization of talk-in-interaction’’ (Lerner, 1996:319). Because Lerner frames interaction in the strong sense, in place of Goffman’s framing in the weak sense, he in effect revises Goffman’s social psychological view of self (section 3.1.1), creating a new understanding of self as achieved in talk that is consistent with the evidence that conversation analysis can provide. Lerner demonstrates both participant orientation to and the procedural consequentiality of participants’ positioning of self relative to other as they interactionally achieve anticipatory completions. His evidence is strong grounding for his new understanding, however in conceptualizing face as an expression of self relative to other, he is also conceptualizing it as an expression of personal identity, and hence as a personcentered attribute, unlike FCT which conceptualizes it as a matter of relationship (section 3.2.3). As such, his new understanding privileges the individual pole of the individual/social dialectic and treats the social (and relationships) simply

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as the aggregate of self and other (section 3.1.1). Lerner is not alone in this regard, in that Raymond and Heritage (2006:700– 701), among others, also conceptualize self and other in terms of interactionally achieved personal identity. One consequence, then, is that in conceptualizing self plus other as a social entity, they do so in the weak, summative sense, rather than in the strong, non-summative sense (section 3.1.1; Arundale, 2009). There is no need to revise Goffman (or Brown and Levinson, 1987) in order to address face in conversation analytic research: FCT offers a fully developed conceptualization that privileges neither the individual nor the social pole, that frames both interaction and relationships in the strong sense, and that understands individual’s selves as achieved in interaction in relationships with others. It is no mere coincidence that Maynard and Zimmerman (1984) find partners achieving relationships through achieving acquaintedness and anonymity, that Heritage (1984) finds affiliation and disaffiliation in conversational actions and sequences, and that Raymond and Heritage (2006) find participants managing a dilemma of involvement and distance with regard to territories of knowledge. From the perspective of FCT, each of these sets of oppositions is an alternative voicing of the connectedness and separateness that is fundamental to all human relationships. Each of these alternative voicings is also framed dualistically as a pair of distinct phenomena, or as the ends of a continuum. From the perspective of FCT they could be more productively framed as dialectics: Maynard and Zimmerman (1984) find evidence of both acquaintedness and anonymity in sequences of talk, but their Goffmanian framework neither anticipates nor explains that finding. From the perspective of FCT, achieving acquaintedness and anonymity is achieving a form of connection and separation, or face, between persons (section 3.2.1). This does not imply, however, that acquaintedness and anonymity, or any of the other sets of oppositions is thereby ‘reduced’ to connectedness and separateness, as if to a common denominator. Each of these sets of oppositions (as sets within an open set) indexes phenomena which, while they may be co-implicated in a single sequence of utterances, is conceptualized and is analyzable in its own terms (Baxter and Montgomery, 1996:30). To understand each of them as aspects of face is to understand the richness and diversity in the ways humans are continually achieving both connection with and separation from one another in talk, and in so doing are achieving both their sociality and their individuality. 4.2. Applying Face Constituting Theory The goal of research using FCT is to understand how participants employ the resources and practices of everyday talk in achieving face. This section returns to Marty and Loes’s conversation to examine how they conjointly co-constitute relational connection and separation, coordinate with their conjoint co-constituting of meaning and of action. Their conversation is the most compact of five published instances of ‘fourth position repair’ (Schegloff, 1992b:1321–1324), and the analysis that follows comprises a data-based ‘noticing’ of two distinct ‘trajectories’ or sequences leading to fourth position repair, together with a conjecture regarding the interactional achievement and conjoint co-constituting of meaning, action, and face in one of these trajectories. The concern in this section is not to provide the in-depth analysis required to confirm either the noticing or the conjecture, but rather to illustrate how an analyst accomplishes the first three procedures in arguing that his/her understanding of face is viable with respect to what the participants achieved. 4.2.1. Fourth position repair A ‘trouble’ in talk-in-interaction is something problematic (Schegloff, 2000:209) in a participant’s projecting or interpreting of a constituent, utterance, or sequence of utterances. A trouble becomes a focus in interaction as a participant ‘initiates’ repair with an utterance that locates what it is that is problematic. If that participant does not initiate repair, i.e., he/she ‘lets it pass,’ the trouble is not an interactional issue (2007:218), though it may remain an issue in his/her interpreting. Initiation of repair normally leads to or is concurrent with a participant’s performing a repair operation on the trouble that has been located, as for example replacing or revising a constituent. Troubles in talk may be singular or multiple, and may be one participant’s doing or be interactionally achieved across turns (1992b:1325), making responsibility for trouble a potential issue (Robinson, 2006). Trouble that occurs within a given first position utterance can be addressed within or just following that position’s talk by the first position speaker, it can be addressed within the second position utterance designed in uptake by another speaker (‘other-initiated’ repair), as well as within third position by the first speaker or within fourth position by the second speaker. Regardless of the position in which it occurs, initiating repair halts progressivity for the participants, any behavior that halts progressivity being ‘‘accountable (Garfinkel, 1967) and thus examined by participants for its interactional import’’ (Robinson, 2006:139). Progressivity is restored if the repair operation is successful (cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1325). Repair is ubiquitous in everyday talk, and its practices have been examined extensively, in particular by Schegloff et al. (1977). Most troubles in talk are addressed in first and second position. Third position repair is much less frequent, and by comparison fourth position repair is relatively rare, however, both are important in talk because they represent the last sequentially organized positions for addressing trouble with a given first position utterance (Schegloff, 1992b). Perhaps the clearest example of fourth position repair is conversation (2) in which Lehroff is director of a local civil defense operation, and during an emergency is calling the home of the municipal truck yard manager, whose first name is Phil. The manager’s son answers, who is also named Phil and who understands himself to have been identified in first position (P1), which he ratifies in second position (P2). Assuming he is talking to the manager, Lehroff designs a sequentially consistent topic initiation in third position (P3), which son Phil finds inconsistent with his interpreting of the identification sequence, prompting him to initiate and to perform repair in fourth position (P4).

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(2)

CDHQ, 15; Openings (Schegloff, 1992b:1322) 1

Phil:

Hello?

P1!

2

Lehroff:

Phil!

P2!

3

Phil:

Yeh.

4

Lehroff:

Josh Lehroff.

5

Phil:

Yeh.

P3!

6

Lehroff:

Ah:: what’ve you gotten so far. Any requests to dispatch any trucks in any areas,

P4!

7

Phil:

Oh you want my daddy.

8

Lehroff:

Yeah, Phi[l,

9

Phil:

[Well he’s outta town at a convention.

In terms of the Conjoint Co-constituting Model, fourth position repair emerges as participant 1 (Lehroff) designs and produces a first position utterance, projecting participant 2’s interpreting and uptake. Participant 2 (Phil) designs a second position utterance that evidences an interpreting of the first position utterance, and that follows sequentially from it. In assessing his(her) interpreting of the second position utterance with regard to his(her) projecting for the first position utterance, participant 1 finds consistency (i.e., Phil’s ‘‘Yeh’’ is sequentially consistent with Lehroff’s candidate identification, and is consistent with his projection for that uptake). As in section 2.3, participant 1 retroactively confirms his(her) provisional projecting of the first position utterance to form an operative interpreting of it, and proceeds to design a third position utterance that follows sequentially from the second position utterance and that maintains progressivity from his (her) perspective (Schegloff, 1992b:1322). In assessing his(her) interpreting of this third position utterance with regard to his(her) provisional projecting for the second position utterance, participant 2 finds inconsistency (i.e., Lehroff’s topic initiation does not follow sequentially from Phil’s ratification because the topic is not within Phil’s territory of knowledge). As participant 2 retroactively modifies his(her) projecting of the second position utterance to form an operative interpreting of it that would reestablish adjacency across second and third positions, he(she) finds further inconsistency between this operative interpreting and his(her) provisional interpreting of participant 1’s first position utterance. In retroactively modifying the latter provisional interpreting to form an operative interpreting of the first position utterance, participant 2 finds this newly formed operative interpreting is inconsistent with his(her) original provisional interpreting for the first position utterance (i.e., Lehroff now seems to be assuming he is talking to Phil’s father, which is not what son Phil had originally interpreted). Participant 2 can let it pass (Schegloff, 1992b:1303), or can address the inconsistency by designing a fourth position utterance that halts progressivity to do repair. A successful fourth position repair involves participant 2’s providing evidence of his(her) resolution of the inconsistency (i.e., ‘‘Oh you want my daddy’’), providing participant 1 with the basis for revising his(her) operative interpreting of the first position utterance, so that the participants conjointly coconstitute at least partially overlapping interpretings, their operative interpretings prior to the repair having been different (section 2.3). The sequential trajectory leading to fourth position repair that is evident in conversation (2) is also apparent in another of the five published instances (Schegloff, 1992b:1324), and will be identified here as the ‘direct’ trajectory because the third position utterance is designed to follow sequentially from the second position utterance. That is not the case in conversation (1), however, or in the two other instances of fourth position repair (Schegloff, 1988, 1992b:1323). Conversation (1) is presented again for comparison, and as a review of the analysis in section 2.3 makes evident, in this instance of what will be identified here as the ‘alternate’ trajectory to fourth position repair, as well as in the other two instances, the third position utterance is not designed to follow sequentially from the second position utterance. (1)

(Schegloff, 1992b:1321)5

P1!

1

Marty:

Loes, do you have a calendar,

P2!

2

Loes:

Yeah ((reaches for her desk calendar))

P3!

3

Marty:

Do you have one that hangs on the wall?

P4!

4

Loes:

Oh, you want one.

5

Marty:

Yeah

In terms of the Conjoint Co-constituting Model, the alternate trajectory parallels the direct trajectory as participant 1 (Marty) designs and produces a first position utterance, projecting participant 2’s interpreting and uptake. Participant 2 (Loes) designs a second position utterance that evidences an interpreting of the first position utterance, and that follows sequentially from it. The two trajectories diverge at this point: in assessing his(her) interpreting of the second position utterance with regard to his(her) projecting for the first position utterance, participant 1 finds inconsistency 5 Conversation (1) was recorded as a field note (Schegloff, 1992b:1321), hence no audio recording is available. Audio for conversation (2) is available at www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/sound-clips.html.

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(i.e., Loes’s uptake is sequentially consistent with Marty’s utterance 1, but it is not consistent with his projection of her uptake). Participant 1 retroactively modifies his(her) provisional projecting of the first position utterance to form an operative interpreting of it that reestablishes adjacency across first and second positions. Participant 1 could let the inconsistency pass, but in the alternate trajectory designs a third position utterance to address it. Because addressing the inconsistency does not follow sequentially from the prior utterance, this third position utterance disrupts progressivity. At this point the two trajectories converge again as described above: participant 2 assesses her(his) interpreting of the third position utterance with regard to her(his) provisional projecting for the second position utterance and finds an inconsistency that leads her(him) toward fourth position repair (i.e., Marty’s third position question does not follow sequentially from Loes’s second position move to offer her calendar). The noticing prompted by examining these five instances of fourth position repair is that there are two, sequentially distinct trajectories leading to the same end point. The direct trajectory involves participant 1’s designing a third position utterance that follows sequentially from participant 2’s second position utterance, and that maintains progressivity from participant 1’s perspective. The alternate trajectory involves participant 1’s designing a third position utterance that does not follow sequentially from the second position utterance, and that disrupts progressivity from both participants’ perspectives. This noticing prompts four key observations. First, at the point of designing his/her third position utterance in the alternate trajectory, participant 1 has knowledge of the trouble(s) that have been interactionally achieved with participant 2 across first and second positions (i.e., Marty is aware of the troubles revealed by Loes’s uptake). At the same point in the direct trajectory, however, participant 1 has no knowledge of trouble(s) in the interaction thus far (i.e., Lehroff is not yet aware of trouble in the identification sequence). Second, because in the alternate trajectory participant 1 has knowledge of the trouble(s) achieved across first and second positions, he/she is also in a position to design an utterance that initiates and performs third position repair. This option is open because the above description of the alternate trajectory, through the point of convergence with the direct trajectory, is also a description of the emergence in talk of third position repair (cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1304–1317). Third, Marty’s third position utterance in conversation (1), together with the third position utterances in the other two instances of the alternate trajectory, neither initiate nor perform third position repair (1992b:1322, fn. 14). Schegloff (1988:57) argues that a third position utterance such as Marty’s both leads the other participant to ‘‘the ‘realization’ that the [second position] response was based on a misunderstanding of what was being responded to,’’ and that ‘‘it’s a matter of sequence organization, not repair organization’’ (2009: personal communication). Fourth, based on the data available, the conjecture that follows from these observations is that in the alternate trajectory, the third and fourth position utterances comprise an unexplored type of ‘non-minimal post-expansion sequence’ (2007:148–168), among the many awaiting description. This post-expansion sequence is fitted to the particular type of trouble arising in Marty and Loes’s first and second position utterances, but is an alternative to third position repair in which the third position utterance affords the doing of fourth position repair. 4.2.2. Addressing procedure 1: achieving face in achieving repair Procedure 1 involves formulating face as interactionally achieved in interactionally achieving meaning and action. Section 3 provides the conceptual formulation, but it remains to provide the operational formulation with regard to Marty and Loes’s conversation. First, face is examined here in the culture-general terms of connection and separation both because the goal is to illustrate the use of FCT, and because this conversation took place in The Netherlands (Schegloff, 2009: personal communication) and no information is available on the culture-specific construal of connection and separation that applies for these participants. Second, in Marty and Loes’s conversation, the achieving of connection and separation articulates with the achieving, respectively, of self-repair and other-repair, of agreeing and disagreeing, of accepting and rejecting, and of aligning and disaligning. As in section 4.1.2, these articulations are common, but are context-sensitive and must be established for each instance of talk. Developing this second aspect of the operational formulation requires considering the practices of repair more closely. At a very general level, and regardless of the position in which repair occurs, any participant can initiate repair, and once initiated any participant can perform repair on the trouble that has been located. The various possible combinations are not symmetrical alternatives, however. The convention in discussing repair is that the speaker of the trouble source turn is ‘self,’ with everyone else being ‘other,’ and the rather considerable evidence is not only that self-initiation of repair is systematically privileged over other-initiation, but also that self-repair is privileged over other-repair (‘repair,’ whether successful or not, being a more general term than ‘correction’).6 The asymmetries of form and occurrence between self and other initiation and between self and other repair arise in the sequential organization of repair practices (Schegloff et al., 1977). Continually reproducing these and other practices in everyday talk maintains them as normative structures that participants both employ in designing and interpreting utterances, and expect others will employ as well (cf. Lerner, 1996:305, 318). One consequence is that participants arguably design utterances to conform with or to afford the producing of privileged forms, as well as to avoid or constrain the producing of non-privileged forms. 6 ‘Systematic privileging’ is more widely discussed as ‘preference organization,’ or the asymmetric ‘valuing’ of alternatives in talk (Schegloff, 2007:58– 96). The terms derive from Lerner (1996:304) and are employed to block the interpreting of ‘preference’ in psychological terms, and particularly in terms of ‘threat’ or ‘support’ (see section 3.3).

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The terms ‘self’ and ‘other’ become problematic in considering fourth position repair (Schegloff, 2000:211), hence it will be useful to depart from the convention by replacing ‘self’ with ‘re one’s own trouble’ and ‘other’ with ‘re another’s trouble.’ Accordingly, ‘self-repair’ or ‘repair re one’s own trouble’ is systematically privileged and involves the speaker of a given turn at talk using his/her own resources to operate on a trouble that he/she or another participant locates within that turn. Repair re one’s own trouble is common following ‘self-initiation’ or ‘initiation re one’s own trouble’ in first position, as well as following ‘other-initiation’ or ‘initiation re another’s trouble’ in second position (Schegloff et al., 1977; cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1326–1328). Performing repair re one’s own trouble has been examined carefully, and if successful reveals the speaker to be competent in managing the trouble he/she has introduced. By comparison, performing ‘other-repair’ or ‘repair re another’s trouble’ is highly constrained in form and occurrence (Schegloff et al., 1977:380), involving someone other than the speaker of a trouble source turn using his/her resources to operate on the trouble located within that speaker’s turn. It is entirely possible for a speaker to design a ‘self-initiation’ or ‘initiation re one’s own trouble’ that invites repair by another participant, but apart from such circumstances, and when initiated by another participant, performing repair re another’s trouble (whether successful or not) is a marked occurrence (1977:379). The systematic privileging of repair re one’s own trouble over repair re another’s trouble is widely observed, although it may be modified in special circumstances, as in interaction between adults and children, or between ‘instructors’ and those being taught to be ‘‘adequate self-monitors and self-correctors as a condition of competence’’ in some arena (Schegloff et al., 1977:381). For that reason, and because repair re a trouble introduced by another participant involves not allowing that person to speak for him/herself (cf. Lerner, 1996:305), repair re another’s trouble is vulnerable to being interpreted as questioning the other’s competency in managing his/her own talk (cf. Jefferson, 1983). Doing so is to differentiate between persons in a relationship rather than to integrate them. Because their positions as receptionist and visiting researcher engaged in routine organizational activities suggest there are no special circumstances involved in Marty and Loes’s interaction, in this instance of talk repair re another’s trouble articulates with relational separation. Given that repair re one’s own trouble can be interpreted as revealing one’s competency in managing talk, doing so may integrate or differentiate persons depending on the relationship achieved in a given sequence, and hence may articulate with connection, with separation, or with both. In addition, repair re another’s trouble in unmodulated form (e.g., a third position ‘‘No, not that kind’’ or ‘‘No, I want one’’ from Marty) is likely to be interpreted as outright disagreement, with modulated forms being seen as partial or tentative disagreement (Schegloff et al., 1977:379–380; cf. Pomerantz, 1984:74–75). Pomerantz provides evidence of the systematic privileging of agreeing with others over disagreeing with them, which is also widely observed, although special circumstances such as one person’s engaging in self-deprecation can modify that privileging, as well (Schegloff, 2007:58– 63). Agreeing with another is convergence between persons in a relationship, whereas disagreeing is divergence, with parallel arguments applying for accepting or rejecting what another offers, and aligning or disaligning with their course of action. Nothing in Marty and Loes’s interaction suggests that special circumstances apply, hence in this instance agreeing, accepting, and aligning articulate with relational connection, while disagreeing, rejecting, and disaligning articulate with separation. 4.2.3. Addressing procedures 2 and 3: Marty and Loes revisited Marty designs turn 1 as a yes/no interrogative. Raymond (2003) argues that yes/no interrogatives both afford and constrain the recipient’s uptake with regard to the type of action expected next, the positive or negative ‘polarity’ of that action, and the grammatical type of the uptake, systematically privileging ‘yes’ or ‘no’ over other utterances. Loes designs turn 2 in uptake, her ‘‘Yeah’’ and move to pick up her desk calendar conforming to all three constraints: she complies with the request as she understands it, her response is positive in polarity, and it is a ‘type-conforming’ ‘yes.’ Raymond (2003:963) argues not only that type-conforming responses are interpreted as accepting ‘‘both the course of action initiated by an interrogative, and the type of recipient one has been proposed to be by it,’’ in this case that he is in a position to request her to provide a calendar, and that in her position as receptionist and/or as keeper of supplies she is obligated to comply, but also that type-conforming responses are ‘‘systematically biased in favor of promoting alignment in courses of action.’’ With regard to action and meaning, Loes’s second position uptake both evidences her orientation to the systematic privileging of typeconforming over non-type-conforming responses, and is procedurally consequential in that it interactionally achieves both meaning (interactionally specifying a desk calendar) and aligning with the course of action Marty initiates (granting his request), as she understands these at this point. With regard to achieving face, as coordinate with achieving meaning and action, Loes’s uptake both evidences her orientation to connection in designing a type-conforming, aligning response where a nontype-conforming, disaligning utterance is an option (as below in examining turn 4), and is procedurally consequential in interactionally achieving connection, together with separation, as she accepts Marty’s proposal regarding the difference in their positions. Loes’s turn 2 uptake sequentially implicates Marty’s accepting or rejecting her offer of the desk calendar in third position. Accepting an offer is systematically privileged, hence if he is not going to let it pass by examining the calendar, Marty must design a third position utterance that addresses the inconsistency he finds given his projection for her second position uptake. Consider first what Marty is not doing. With regard to meaning and action, Marty has the knowledge required to initiate and to perform third position repair. Such repair is systematically privileged with respect to fourth position repair because the opportunity initiate it appears earlier in the repair initiation opportunity space (Schegloff, 1992b:1326–1327; Schegloff et al., 1977:375). Third position utterances designed to do repair commonly have a highly recognizable, canonical

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form (Schegloff, 1992b:1304–1317), such that if Marty were to say ‘‘No, I want one to keep, not to look at,’’ he would locate trouble in the problematic sequential implicativeness of her uptake (1987), and would perform repair re Loes’s trouble by replacing her turn 2 action with a new action. If he were instead to say ‘‘No, I mean a wall calendar, not a desk calendar,’’ he would locate trouble in his own problematic reference to ‘‘a calendar,’’ and would perform repair re his own trouble by providing a more adequate reference. Either of these canonical third position repairs (or variants of them) would be readily recognizable as utterances designed to do repair, halting progressivity with the expectation that it will be restored by the other participant’s uptake in fourth position. With regard to face, as integral with meaning and action, a third position repair re Loes’s trouble is projectably interpretable not only as questioning her competency to address troubles in their talk, but also as disaligning with Loes’s granting of his request, and as disagreeing on the type of calendar. A third position repair re his own trouble is similarly interpretable if Loes draws the inference that Marty’s repair re his problematic reference also implies repair re the problematic sequential implicativeness of her uptake. These interpretings articulate in this instance with separation. If Marty were to opt for third position repair, this projectable achieving of separation would take place against the background of the connection already achieved in Loes’s aligning and accepting in turn 2, her uptake having been designed on the basis of her provisional interpreting of turn 1, for which Marty is accountable. In opting not to design a canonical third position repair where that possibility is both open to him, and systematically privileged (cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1322, fn. 14), Marty is actively avoiding potential interpretings of disagreement and disalignment, as well as of questioning Loes’s competency by directly or indirectly performing repair re her trouble. Marty is thus actively avoiding the possibility of achieving separation, vis-a´-vis the connection they have just achieved. Consider second what Marty is doing in designing a third position utterance to address the inconsistency he finds given Loes’s second position uptake, together with what Loes is doing in designing her fourth position repair. In other words, consider what the two of them are achieving interactionally in the conjectured post-expansion sequence that characterizes the alternate trajectory. With regard to meaning and action, in third position Marty designs another yes/no interrogative that effectively repeats his entire question in turn 1, the pro-term ‘‘one’’ replacing ‘‘a calendar,’’ with the clause ‘‘that hangs on the wall’’ appended. Repeating one’s prior utterance in this manner is uniformly interpreted as a participant’s redoing whatever he/she has done previously (e.g., Schegloff, 1996:200), perhaps with modifications. More specifically, in replacing ‘‘a calendar’’ with ‘‘one,’’ Marty indexes the only type of calendar that has been interactionally specified at this point, i.e., desk calendars. In then appending ‘‘that hangs on the wall,’’ he interactionally re-specifies the type of calendar he was indexing in turn 1. In redoing his first position utterance with this further specification, Marty redoes his original request, but now with the problematic reference addressed. Marty’s design of a re-request is interactional evidence of his orientation to the projectable interpretings of disagreement, disalignment, and questioning Loes’s competency considered above. His design choices are procedurally consequential in that having addressed the trouble he introduced, he affords Loes the opportunity in fourth position to agree, to align, and to reveal her competency by performing repair re her own trouble. Marty’s third position re-request is not sequentially consistent with Loes’s second position uptake. It halts progressivity from her perspective, and her fourth position uptake provides evidence of what she takes to be its interactional import. Loes’s turn-initial ‘‘Oh’’ is a prototypical ‘change of state’ token characteristic of fourth position repair (Schegloff, 1992b:1323): it is an interactional indexing that at this point in talk she has come to understand something she did not understand before (Heritage, 2005). She immediately evidences her new understanding as Marty’s ‘‘want’’ to obtain ‘‘one,’’ now interactionally respecified as a wall calendar, as opposed to his asking to borrow her desk calendar. In evidencing the operative interpreting she has just formed of the meaning and action of his first position utterance, and in evidencing it as changed from her prior provisional interpreting, Loes also evidences that she aligns with Marty’s original provisional projecting, in effect deleting the interpreting of meaning and action she evidenced in second position (cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1322, fn. 14). Loes’s utterance is designed specifically to do repair. Because he has just respecified ‘‘one’’ as a wall calendar, her focal stress on ‘‘want’’ targets not the problematic reference he introduced in first position, but the problematic sequential implicativeness of her second position uptake. In performing repair re her own trouble, Loes evidences her orientation to the opportunity for such repair afforded by Marty’s design of his third position utterance. Her repair is procedurally consequential in that she interactionally achieves both alignment with Marty’s original course of action and agreement on its meaning, on the bases of her newly formed operative interpretings of what they achieved interactionally across first and second positions. With regard to achieving face, as coordinate with achieving meaning and action in the conjectured post-expansion sequence, Marty’s design of a third position re-request, rather than of a third position repair, is interactional evidence of his orientation to the projectable interpretings of separation that would arise in disagreeing, disaligning, and directly or indirectly performing repair re the trouble she introduced. More importantly, Marty’s redoing of his first position request evidences his orientation to the potential for connection, and is procedurally consequential in affording the possibility of achieving it. That is, in designing his third position re-request to address the trouble he introduced in first position, and for which he is reflexively accountable, Marty affords Loes an opportunity to provide a new uptake that potentially aligns and agrees with the interpreting he projected for the original request. In doing so he also affords Loes the opportunity to perform repair re the trouble she introduced in second position, such repair being systematically privileged over the repair re another’s trouble that would occur had Marty designed a third position repair. In short, Marty’s third position re-request affords their achieving of connection, rather than separation. Loes’s design of a fourth position utterance that performs repair re her own trouble is interactional evidence of her orientation to the opportunities Marty created in third position. She could provide evidence of a quite different orientation

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by addressing not her trouble, but Marty’s, as in responding to his re-request with something like ‘‘Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place.’’ She does not do so. Instead, her uptake of Marty’s re-request is procedurally consequential in achieving connection, not only by aligning and agreeing with his original projection of a request to obtain a wall calendar, but also by performing repair re her own trouble. That repair reveals her competency in addressing the trouble with sequential implicativeness which she introduced, just as Marty revealed his competency in addressing his trouble with problematic reference. Their actions in addressing the troubles they interactionally achieved across first and second positions (Schegloff, 1992b:1325) are congruent, rather than divergent, as they would be had Marty opted for third position repair. Given the affordances Marty provided in the first pair part of the conjectured post-expansion sequence, Loes’s uptake in the second pair part interactionally achieves connection, not only against the background of the potential for achieving separation if Marty had designed a third position repair, but also against the background of the connection they achieved earlier in Loes’s second position uptake, now sequentially deleted by her action, rather than by his. Interestingly, in designing her fourth position repair to achieve connection, Loes also designs it to achieve separation in that unlike her second position uptake, her fourth position uptake does not conform to any of the constraints on responses to yes/no interrogatives that Marty reactivates in redoing his request. A full analysis would show that in resisting these constraints Loes claims her epistemic right to act on the basis of her own knowledge and experience (Heritage and Raymond, 2005:24) and actively asserts her competency with respect to Marty (cf. Raymond and Heritage, 2006:701). She thus achieves a measure of independence from him that parallels the difference and hence separation in their positions she accepted in achieving connection in her earlier type-conforming response. The ‘‘fine-grained interpretive matrix’’ (Raymond, 2003:955) of such non-type-conforming responses reveals connection and separation in dynamic interplay within single utterances, as well as over sequences of utterances. That is exactly what FCT’s dialectical conceptualization of face leads one both to expect and to examine (section 3.2.2; cf. Grainger et al., 2010). 4.2.4. Finding face in the alternate trajectory to fourth position repair Marty’s turn 5 ‘‘Yeah’’ immediately confirms what he and Loes have achieved across the conjectured post-expansion sequence. Unless it engenders further repair, Loes’s turn 6 uptake will complete the conjoint co-constituting of their interpretings of meaning, action, and face across the four positions (cf. Schegloff, 1992b:1326–1327). Their conjoint co-constituting of face in this one instance becomes part of their on-going process of ‘doing relational connection and separation,’ and with it ‘doing relating’ in conjointly co-constituting meaning and action in talk (cf. Raymond and Heritage, 2006:700–701). Marty and Loes interactionally achieve and conjointly co-constitute meaning, action, and face in ways fitted to their specific circumstances, as do the participants in the other two instances of the alternate trajectory to fourth position repair (Schegloff, 1988). Careful study of these instances reveals, however, that the procedural characteristics of the conjectured post-expansion sequence (procedure 4) are the same in all three conversations: (a) the sequence occurs in sequential environments where participant 2 designs a sequentially consistent, systematically privileged uptake in second position that is not consistent with the uptake participant 1 had projected for his/her first position utterance; (b) in third position participant 1 does not engage in repair, but instead initiates an expansion sequence by redoing his/her first position utterance with modifications that address trouble he/she introduced in first position; (c) participant 2 designs a fourth position repair that addresses trouble he/she introduced in second position. The presence of this conjectured sequence distinguishes the alternate trajectory to fourth position repair from the direct trajectory. Clearly further research is needed to confirm this noticing of two trajectories, to examine the conjectured sequence, and to explore its relationships to other postexpansion sequences (Schegloff, 2007:149–168). Again, the goal of research using FCT is to understand how participants like Marty and Loes employ the resources and practices of everyday talk in interactionally achieving and conjointly co-constituting face. The concern in this section has been to exemplify how an analyst argues that the achieving of face he/she finds in examining talk is congruent with what the participants themselves achieved. Finding face in Marty and Loes’s conversation unexpectedly involved noticing two sequentially distinct trajectories to fourth position repair, and then delineating the unexplored post-expansion sequence that characterizes one of them. The argument herein is that coordinate with their interactional achieving and conjoint co-constituting of meaning and of action, Marty and Loes interactionally achieve and conjointly co-constitute face across all positions, and in third and fourth positions achieve a post-expansion sequence fitted to achieving greater connection between them, at a point where greater separation is a distinct possibility. Central to this argument are articulating certain meanings and actions with connection and separation, demonstrating Marty and Loes are engaged in or oriented to achieving these meanings, actions, and connectedness/separateness, and demonstrating that the achieving of these meanings, actions, and face is consequential in shaping the trajectory of their conversation. That the achieving of meaning, action, and face argued herein is congruent with what Marty and Loes achieved in their talk rests, then, on the evidence, which in this analysis and others like it is the very same evidence that Marty and Loes provide to one another of their interpretings of meaning, action, and face. 5. FCT’s explanation of face and facework From the perspective of Face Constituting Theory, face is the relational connection and separation that Marty and Loes, and all other participants in conversation, interactionally achieve across any two position sequence, as well as conjointly co-constitute across the three position architecture of communication. Separation and connection are achieved together, one

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or both poles becoming at times more apparent amidst the shifting contingencies of everyday talk. That participants are continually achieving and re-achieving face is not a defect in FCT’s conceptualization, but rather a recognition of the complex, dynamic, dialectical nature of face and facework. A moment’s reflection on one’s own experience in everyday interaction will make this characteristic of face and facework apparent, and continued research using FCT will make it evident. Face Constituting Theory represents a marked departure from existing theories of face because it rests on a radically different conceptualization of human communication in the strong, non-summative sense of the conjoint co-constituting of entwined operative interpretings among interdependent individuals (section 2). The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication is basic to FCT’s conceptualization of face as interactional. Face Constituting Theory is also a marked departure because it rests on a radically different conceptualization of face, not as a person-centered attribute, but as arising in the relationships persons form with one another as they continually address the inescapable dialectic tension between their individuality and their sociality (section 3). Face Constituting Theory is in this regard one component of a more general ‘Relationship Constituting Theory.’ In view of these two departures, Face Constituting Theory is a marked departure in yet another very important way. Whereas existing theories take it as obvious that face arises in talk, FCT’s conceptualization of face as both interactional and relational conceptualizes face interpretings as an order of interpreting that is integral with, yet distinct from interpretings of meaning and of action (section 3.1.3). Face, meaning, and action are coordinate achievements in everyday talk. Face Constituting Theory is also a marked departure given the scope of its explanation. On one hand, because FCT conceptualizes interaction from the participant’s perspective (Haugh, 2007b; MacMartin et al., 2001), rather than from the analyst’s, its explanation focuses research on the resources and practices that participants themselves employ in interactionally achieving and conjointly co-constituting face in specific instances of everyday talk. FCT is unique in providing guidelines that address the problems arising when analysts impose their understandings of face and facework on participants (section 4.1). On the other hand, because FCT both conceptualizes face threat, face stasis, and face support as evaluations by individuals of their face projectings and interpretings, and provides a model of how such evaluations arise, it provides an explanation for the entire scope of human facework from outright threat, through maintenance in stasis or by balancing, to outright face support (section 3.3). FCT is unique in conceptualizing face stasis, in integrating threat, stasis, and support into a single explanation, and hence in identifying these phenomena as foci for future research. In addition, in defining face as the interactional achieving and conjoint co-constituting of connectedness with others, in dialectical tension with separateness from them, FCT provides a broad scope, etic conceptualization, and is therefore a second-order theory of face (i.e., face2) that is nevertheless directly interpretable in terms of specific, first-order, emic conceptualizations of face (i.e., face1, as Haugh and Bargiela-Chiappini, 2010). Face Constituting Theory addresses the question ‘‘How do participants achieve face in everyday conversation?’’ Brown and Levinson (1987) provided an essential insight regarding face as central in using language, together with a signal critique of their model of language use: one to be addressed by any new theory seeking to capture that insight, develop it, and extend it to new research questions. FCT is unique in addressing their critique, but FCT develops and extends their insight as a theory of face and facework, not as a theory of politeness. FCT provides grounds for explaining (im)politeness, but in ways distinct from Brown and Levinson and other theorists (as in Eelen, 2001; Haugh, 2007b; see Arundale, 2006:210–211). FCT is more complex than Goffman’s (1955), Brown and Levinson’s (1987), and other’s treatments of face and facework. The Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication is more complex than the encoding/decoding models that underlie other theories, the conceptualization of face is more complex than that of other framings, and the complexities of evaluating interpretings of face as threat, stasis, or support have no counterpart. Such complexity demands justification in view of William of Occam’s injunction. A full justification is not possible here, but its most important component is that FCT not only explains the phenomena addressed in existing theories of face and facework, but also explains a number of new and important phenomena within a new theory that is ‘‘well equipped’’ for conceptualizing interaction in terms of ‘‘its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it’’ (1987:48). Acknowledgements Portions of this paper were resented at the 90th Conference of the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL, USA, November 2004. Jeffrey Robinson and Emanuel Schegloff were instrumental in shaping the analysis in section 4.2, but neither bears any responsibility for its limitations. References Arundale, Robert B., 1999. An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics 9, 119–153. Arundale, Robert B., 2005. Pragmatics, conversational implicature, and conversation. 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