Emotivity and face: Displaying and soliciting emotivity in Chinese mediation interactions

This paper builds on the previous studies of emotion in relation to face which suggest that emotion/emotional reactions are fundamental component of relational work (Culpeper, 2011; Langlotz and Locher, 2013; Spencer-Oatey, 2007; Terkourafi, 2007), and thus they might be constitutive of facework. Based on a detailed discussion of natural language data, it is argued that Chinese participants in a mediation session display their emotional concerns as part of their topical requests in order to solicit emotivity from the other party. A proposal is thus put forward to move beyond the current focus on lexemes in studies of face in Chinese, and to provide empirical evidence regarding emotivity invoked as a discursive resource in the interactional accomplishment of face. It is hoped that this paper can stimulate more research not only on face in Chinese in relation to emotivity, but also on other contexts in different languages and cultures where emic concepts of emotivity are strategically invoked in relational work.