Facework and Ideology in Welcome Speech

Abstract

This study examines the welcome speech made at the opening of the first World Chinese Conference held in Beijing in July 2005 by extending facework analysis from interpersonal to institutional settings, in order to reveal the strategic use of facework for ideological purposes.  Departing from generic structure, speech act theory and facework, the paper shows that the generic function of welcome speech as a speech act of extending welcome is strategically explored by the speaker to achieve the primary speech act (Searle 1975) of justifying Chinese language teaching/learning by means of redressing potential face needs.  Specifically, the strategies of demarcation of self and others, self-face support, and other-face support (positive and negative) are used at various stages of the speech for the justification of teaching/ learning Chinese as a foreign language as well as the establishment or restoration of rapport.  It is argued that (1) an extension of facework and speech act theory is needed for analyzing speech in institutional context; (2) the form-function tension in facework research could only be satisfactorily accounted for by referring to social contexts.