A Linguistic Appraisal of Brown and Levinson’s Face Management Act View Using Charles Chinedu Ochendu’s Fools’ Paradise

It is fascinating to appraise linguistic theories through the analysis of literary texts.This paper is an appraisal of Brown and Levinson's Face Management View (cited in Bossan Rita [1]) through the analysis of corpora selected from Charles Chinedu Ochendu's [2] novel, Fools' Paradise.Language theories or postulations provide useful insights on language use across genres, including the novel genre.The Face Management View captures not only the sociocultural and psychological of face threatening acts, but also their communicative potentials in written and spoken texts.The selected conversational turns were subjected to analysis to reveal whether or not face threatening acts (FTAs) and face saving acts (FSAs) were performed, the pragmatic motivations for performing FTAs and FSAs and the implications on the message of a text.The study concludes that even though the theory is bereaved of the dynamics of non-verbal communication, it is suitable for explaining the psychological context of language use in human interactions.