Abstract

This paper focuses on the motivational concerns that underlie the management of relations. In linguistics, the management of relations has been discussed extensively within politeness theory, and so the paper starts by identifying four key issues of controversy in politeness theory: a) should „polite‟ language use be explained in terms of face (e.g. Brown and Levinson, 1987), conversational maxims (e.g. Leech, 1983), and/or conversational rights (e.g. Fraser, 1990); b) why are speech acts such as orders interpersonally sensitive – is it because they are a threat to our autonomy (Brown and Levinson, 1987), or because of cost–benefit concerns (Leech, 1983); c) is Brown and Levinson‟s concept of negative face too individually focused, and should a social identity component be included (Matsumoto, 1988); and d) is face just a personal/individual concern or can it be a group concern (Gao, 1996)? The paper then uses reports of authentic rapport sensitive incidents to throw light on these controversial issues and to find out the relational management concerns that people perceive in their everyday lives. It maintains that such data is important to politeness theory, because linguistic politeness needs to be studied within the situated social psychological context in which it occurs. The paper ends by presenting and arguing for a conceptual framework that draws a fundamental distinction between face and sociality rights, and that incorporates an independent/interdependent perspective, thus providing a more comprehensive framework for analysing the management of relations than is currently available.

1. INTRODUCTION
Many authors (e.g. Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson, 1967; Brown and Yule, 1983) have pointed out that an important macro function of language is the effective management of relationships. In linguistics, this perspective on language use has been