British and American Expressions of Politeness in Anger-Evoking Contexts: A Cultural-Relativistic Approach

Drawing on a contrastive analysis of TV talk shows Kilroy and Jerry Springer, this paper examines how participants exploit different politeness strategies in talk-show conflict, and how they build public identities for themselves and their opponents through discourse. More precisely, this article argues that the study of face management in British and American confrontational episodes makes it possible, not only to justify a cultural-relativistic approach to the expression of politeness, but also to characterise and define different notions of face in this specific anger-evoking context.