Verbal and Non-Verbal Means of Face-Saving in English Conflict Discourse

Abstract

In the paper, the logic of the conflict discourse unfolding and the formation of the emotional and pragmatic potential of its utterances is seen as directly dependent on the dynamics of communicators’ faces, where the concept of face represents a person’s self-perception as a certain social value. A communicator’s feeling that his face is threatened, damaged or lost due to the facethreatening acts on the part of his opponent gives rise to a strong negative effect on a psychoenergetic level, thus triggering the instinctive function of self-preservation to restore face and normalize the effect by means of certain actions. Such behavioral regulation of affect is achieved by activating complexes of verbal and non-verbal means.