Resumen de Losing Face on Facebook: Linguistic Strategies to Repair Face in a Spanish Common Interest Group
Within the frameworks of facework and digital discourse, this chapter analyzes the linguistic strategies a group of Spanish Facebook users employ to restore face (either theirs or other members’) whenever lost, thus preventing any possible conflict(s) in the group. Adopting a quantitative and qualitative approach, the author analyzes a corpus of 14 natural exchanges consisting of 412 turns and 12,327 words. Results show that giving an account, using humor or expressing ignorance make up most cases of face self-repair. Contrary to expectations, other-repair is extremely frequent, and mostly tends to involve expressing support for the others so as to repair the group’s harmony, which indicates participants highly value the group’s unity
