An Exploratory Study of Face-Saving Strategies in Performing Face-Threatening Speech Acts: Evidence from English and Persian

Building on theories of face and politeness, a considerable portion of studies in interpersonal and interlanguage pragmatics have focused on threats to interlocutors’ face and the strategies to mitigate them. However, a thorough understanding of facework mechanisms and face-saving strategies, warrants further investigation. To contribute to this line of research, the present qualitative study adopted a descriptive approach to extract and formulate the face-saving strategies used by English native speakers, Iranian Persian speakers, and Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, four inherently face-threatening speech acts of refusal, request, persuasion, and advice were studied by triangulating data from conceptual literature review, corpus analysis, and ethnographical observation. The results of hybrid thematic analysis revealed that face-saving strategies can be postulated into four global categories of Emotional Appeal (with 11 sub-strategies listed), Avoidance/Distraction (24), Elaboration (38), and Direct (12). It was also demonstrated and concluded that while these global strategies and sub-strategies are by no means mutually-exclusive, often the distinction between them is blurred and definitions are slippery. These findings are hoped to provide a workable coding scheme for future studies in cross-cultural pragmatics and pragmatic transfer in applied linguistics and EFL research.