Title: A Study of Face Management in Consulters’ Responses to Criticism in Emotional Phone-in Radio Programs

Abstract: This paper has analyzed the discourse of consulters’ management of their faces when responding to criticism in emotional phone-in radio programs, which has revealed eight face strategies. The paper has also probed into five kinds of sequence organizations formed by these strategies and shown that the hosts’ construction and maintenance of their epistemic status are the main reasons for the formation of the structure of these sequence organizations. This study can enrich the categories of face management strategies and help to explain the forms of sequence organizations in face management from the perspective of epistemic status, hence contributing to the research on face and phone-in conversations.

Keywords: consulters, responses to criticism, face strategies, sequence organization, epistemic status

Author: Zhuo Peng, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Shaoguan College, Shaoguan, Guangdong, China.