Face in Italian Compliments

In this paper the notion of face will be analyzed in relation to compliments. It will be argued that: (i) Brown and Levinson’s notion of face can be useful in the study of compliments provided it undergoes some revision along the lines suggested by O’Driscoll; (ii) only by analyzing compliments as sequences of utterances in talk-in-interaction (cf. Arundale’s “face-constituting theory”), can we understand their actual relationship with face. On a more theoretical and methodological level, compliments, like any other speech act, cannot be defined as intrinsically damaging acts or enhancing face ones if they are studied as decontextualized acts.