Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 347

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

“You're not the boss of me!” Service calls to a public transport company

Authors: Orthaber, Sara
Submitted by: Orthaber, Sara (University of Maribor, Faculty of Logistics, Slovenia)

Calls for service are frequently mundane mediated encounters between a call agent and a customer, in which much of the time, expectations in routine exchanges are confirmed and face does not become salient. In such settings formal forms of address are frequently required as the context is an institutional one and the institutional agents are to avoid threatening or damaging the customer’s face. Hence, the use of facework and politeness strategies is likely to occur.

This paper examines face manifestations in calls for service to a Slovenian transport company. Using data from the customer service context, the aim is to examine how, in an interaction between the agent and the customer, face is manifested over the course of a set of sequences, through which customers request specific travel information from the company agent. For the analysis, inbound calls made by customers were selected, in which an agent threatens the callers’ face when they inhibit sequence progressivity through insertion sequences, i.e. interruptions etc., by reacting to them in a negative way, by correcting the customers' inaccurate use of technical terms and by responding to their utterances in a patronising tone. At the same time, as we will show in the analysis, the agent’s interactional style is overly polite throughout the conversation, thus minimizing the likelihood of a reaction from the callers, placing them in a subordinate position.

Key words: face, service calls, institutional talk, hyper-politeness

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

“You're not the boss of me!” Service calls to a public transport company