Teasing and ambivalent face in Japanese multi-party discourse

This paper examines teasing – an interactionally delicate social action, which appears to be both face threatening and face enhancing – situated in Japanese institutional multi-party discourse. Adopting conversation analytic and ethnographic approaches to discourse, this paper first reconsiders the notion of face and facework as discursively constructed phenomena. The paper then documents how the face of tease recipients is displayed and contested in discourse: the linguistic behavior of the teased immediately before the onset of a teasing sequence exhibits certain deviations, which trigger the subsequent tease. The paper takes a closer look at the emerging face of the teased from the perspective of their community of practice. It demonstrates how the tease recipients’ modes of participation are related to face threats occurring in teasing segments and how their active role in the joint act of teasing may impact the construction of their evolving identities within their community of practice. The findings suggest that teasing sequences represent instances in which a tacit norm of appropriateness becomes observable in discourse, that facework can be depicted as an argumentative process in which one's face ascription is contested and altered, and that the face threats involved in specific teasing segments are related to the tease recipients’ mode of participation in their community of practice.