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therefore help to find whether any face strategies were being used and to formulate how facework, if any, was being done by the press. At this point, it is necessary to establish a typology of verbal face strategies.
It has been pointed out that some impression management theorists have mentioned the loss of face as a factor for favourable self-presentation. They have also extracted the strategies used by people to enhance the favourableness and to forestall threats to face. These strategies are found to be of tremendous value in constructing a typology of verbal face strategies. Of particular utility is the work done by Tedeschi and Reiss (1981b). Table 5 is a collection of all the strategies that could be summarized and drawn from previous studies and reasoning.
TABLE 5. A Table of Verbal Face Strategies
Situation Enhancing Threatening Whose Focus One's Facc Other's One's Other's Responsibility Entailing BIRG (we) (Acclaiming) Excuse Repréhension Meta-accounts Disclaimer Consequences Enhancing BIRG (Ingratiating) (Flattery) Justification Blasting Reactance Vilification Others Meta-accounts Blame Apology Modulation Evasion Silence/Mum NegligenceLegend: BIRG = Basking in reflected glory.
It can be seen that the strategies are classified under face-threatening or face-enhancing situations. This is because situations may affect the type of strategies used. A further categorization on another axis is the focus of the strategies. They could be either on responsibility or on consequences of the situations (Tedeschi and Reiss, 1981a:7-9), or those other than these two.