Face Concerns and Requests in Japan: Exploring the Effects of Relational Closeness and Social Status

Abstract

The present study examines the relationships among situational features, face concerns, and requesting strategies in the light of discourse patterns and speech levels. Japanese participants (N = 428) rated these measures in one of four situations where relational closeness (high and low) and social status (high and equal) were manipulated. The results of the path analysis generally confirmed that the situational model that predicted situational factors influenced face concerns and requesting language use, and face concerns were mediators from situational factors to language use. These results are discussed in the cultural contexts of face theories.

Keywords:

• Face Concerns
• Requests
• Politeness
• Relational Closeness
• Social Status
• Japanese

Acknowledgement

I thank Editor Jerry Allen and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. I also thank my writing team (John Oetzel, Mary Jane Collier, and Consolata Mutua) and Jiro Takai for their constructive and thoughtful advice.

Notes

[1] Brown and Levinson (1987) used the term “positive” face for approval face and “negative” face for autonomy face; however, these terms may lead to difficulty in understanding face concepts. Thus, this paper used the term of approval and autonomy face as similarly done by Ting-Toomey (1988), and Lim and Bowers (1991).

[2] As an illustration of different forms of sentence final position according to three speech levels, I demonstrate examples below by using the request expressions asking academic advisors or classmates to postpone the deadline of the paper, which is a target scenario in this paper. The forms at the sentence final position vary according to three different speech levels: (a) plain form: nobashite moraeru? (Can you postpone?) (b) formal form: nobashite morae masu ka? (Could you postpone?) (c) honorific form: nobashite itadake masu ka? (Would it be possible to postpone?) As for (a), plain verb forms that were specifically used for persons with equal or lesser social status can be expressed as nobashite (postpone) moraeru [(a) auxiliary verb describing the person someone's favor or action is directed at]. In (b), however, masu was added as polite markers. For honorific forms, itadaku, an honorific subsidiary verb, was substituted for moraeru. These phenomena were seen pervasively in Japanese expressions despite the gradually decreasing tendency among youngsters of using honorific forms toward superiors (Carrol, 2005).

[3] It is desirable to adopt the same scenario for both high and equal social status conditions to examine the influence of the social status on face concerns and requesting expressions. The differences in scenario may be a confounding factor to explain the differences in face concerns. However, it was extremely difficult to create the same scenario. To remedy this, the author first collected the scenarios that were used in previous and created several scenarios and asked five graduate students majoring in social psychology to confer upon what would be the suitable to reach a consensus. The scenarios shown in the Appendix were finally selected. This request scenario was widely used in the previous research (e.g., Baxter, 1984; Kim & Wilson, 1994). Another limitation was that only one specific scenario was created in each condition. To generalize the relationship among face concerns and requesting expression in certain situations, making a few similar scenarios was necessary to attribute the findings to the investigated situation. Strictly speaking, using one scenario can only attribute the findings to the scenario situation, rather than to the investigated situation in general (Jackson, 1992).

[4] To examine the degree of face concerns according to differences in situational contexts, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed with situational factors of social status and relational closeness and subscales of face concerns as independent variables and ratings of face concerns as a dependent variable. Significant results were found at two-way interactions between social status and types of face concerns, Wilks’ lambda =. 84, F(3, 410) = 25.63, p <. 001, partial η ² =. 16, and between relational closeness and types of face concerns, Wilks’ lambda =. 97, F(3, 410) = 3.27, p <. 05, partial η ² =. 02. The post-hoc comparison of the interaction effect between social status and face concerns revealed that (a) in the equal social status condition, other-autonomy (M = 4.77, SE =. 08), self-approval(M = 4.69, SE =. 08), and self-autonomy face concerns (M = 4.62, SE =. 07) were higher than other-approval (M = 4.24, SE =. 08), and (b) in high social status condition, other-autonomy (M = 4.99, SE =. 08) and self-approval face concerns (M = 5.15, SE =. 08) were higher than self-autonomy (M = 4.57, SE =. 06) and other-approval (M = 3.70, SE =. 08). Concerning post-hoc comparisons between relational closeness and face concerns, the results revealed that (a) in equal social status conditions, other-autonomy(M = 4.71, SE =. 08), self-approval(M = 4.60, SE =. 08), and self-autonomy (M = 4.51, SE =. 07) were higher than the other-approval(M = 3.72, SE =. 08), and (b) in high social status condition, other-autonomy (M = 5.05, SE =. 08) and self-approval (M = 5.04, SE =. 08) were higher than self-autonomy (M = 4.68, SE =. 08) and other-approval (M = 4.23, SE =. 07). The results showed that both other-autonomy and self-approval face concerns were high in degree, and other-autonomy face concerns in particular were not affected by differences in social status and only subtly influenced by relational closeness.