Gudrun Held, Ph.D., is a retired Professor of Italian and French Linguistics at the Department of Romance Philology, University of Salzburg (Austria). Her research draws on linguistic pragmatics, communication theory and multimodal media textuality under synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. Particularly concerned with questions of linguistic politeness in Romance lingua-cultures, she has published a monograph (Narr, 1995), several edited volumes and a series of articles in Manuals and Scientific Journals.

• ForewordList of FiguresContributors1 Introduction: The concept of face revisitedGudrun HeldPart1 Face: a metaphorical notion under intercultural scrutiny2 Roman notions of face: An analysis of the Latin personaLuis Unceta Gómez3 Amour-propre “self-love” and flattery: “Face” pessimism in late-modern French sourcesAnnick Paternoster4 Remarks on face as a folk concept in RomanianMihaela Constantinescu5 A value-construct approach to face expressions in Chinese and Japanese LinguaculturesXiao Qi and Zhou LingPart2 Face in interaction or verbal faces of face6 From negative to positive face: Apologizing in the history of ItalianChiara Fedriani and Chiara Ghezzi7 Face in Italian complimentsGiovanna Alfonzetti8 Face(s) and facework(s) in a corpus of Italian and German complimentsMarina Castagneto and Miriam Ravetto9 “Facework Night”: Representations of Self and Other(s) in the Presidential Concession SpeechFrancesca SantulliAfterword: Some thoughts on face1 and face2Jim O’DriscollIndex