A Study On Potential Face Threatening Acts In Business Interviews

As a kind of public talk show,business interviews play a significant role in public relations.By participating in business interviews,entrepreneurs can show their positive images,which is one of the interactional goals that both parties in the interviews aim to achieve.While in authentic business interviews,there are some acts potentially threatening interviewees’ face such as joking,mocking,or teasing termed as Potential Face Threatening Act(abbr.PFTA)which is conflicting with the goal mentioned above.By observing the authentic business interviews,this study investigated the PFTAs in business interviews with Identity Theory and the Principle of Goal-direction through the ‘bottom-up’ approach,aiming to explore the mechanism and effects of PFTAs in business interviews.The analysis of micro sub-goals of PFTAs shows that,in business interviews,the interviewees have three different synchronic levels of identity: the individual level,the relational level and the collective level,the identity levels of the interviewees respectively determine the corresponding face sensitive attributes.The interviewer performs PFTAs to the interviewees by doubting,making fun of,or bringing up the interviewees’ face sensitive attributes.Due to the degrees of face sensitivity of different attributes vary from each other,the degrees of potential threat of different PFTAs are also different.By comparing the degrees of potential threat of PFTAs,the interviewees decide which goal interaction pattern(the goal-adopting pattern,the goal-refusing pattern,or the goal-laying aside pattern)to adopt to respond to the PFTAs.The analysis of the macro general goals of PFTAs indicates that on the interviewer’s sub-goals of performing the PFTAs,both parties in the interviews are goal-conflicting(competing);while on the general goal they are goalconvergent,for the PFTAs can contrarily reinforce the interviewees’ face and simultaneously make the interviews more valuable.Based on this,it has been proved that the PFTAs in the business interviews are simultaneously potentially facethreatening and face-supportive.This study can not only enrich the linguistic study of face and interview discourse but also offer a useful practical guide to discourse strategies for the participating parties in business interviews or other similar public relations activities to a certain extent.