How May I Help You? Face Manifestations in Nigerian Front Counter Staff-Customer Interaction

Abstract

This paper examines interactions between Nigerian front counter staff and their customers. It seeks to answer questions such as: what face management strategies do Nigerian front counter staff employ in their interaction with their customers/clients? What do they achieve with the use of these strategies? The analysis is based on the framework proposed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) politeness model. The data consists of a corpus of naturally occurring conversations taken from banks, hotels and an airport. The findings reveal three strategies for negative politeness namely: deference, indirectness and begging for forgiveness. The data also show four strategies for positive politeness which include solidarity and in-group identity markers, compliments, showing concern and interest as well as greetings. The study shows that politeness as a discourse phenomenon explicitly abounds in the speech of front counter staff as generally defined in the literature.