Face Threatening Acts in The Glass Castle: A Pragmatic Study of Dysfunctional Family Communication

Abstract

Face-threatening acts (FTAs) are verbal actions that can damage a person's self-image, usually occurring in situations of conflict, disagreement, or tension. The research aims to identify the types and strategies of Face Threatening Acts and to examine how these acts reflect dysfunctional communication patterns within the family. The analysis applies Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory to classify Face Threatening Acts, Olson’s (Circumplex Model to identify dysfunctional communication dimensions, and Cutting and Fordyce’s context theory to interpret the communicative situations. This research employed a qualitative descriptive method. The data were taken from selected dialogues in the movie that contain Face Threatening Acts, collected through purposive sampling. The analysis involved classifying the data into types of Face Threatening Acts, which are divided into threats to positive face and threats to negative face. Next, this analysis identifies the strategies used, which are divided into bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record. And relating the findings to dysfunctional family communication dimensions, which are divided into dimensions of cohesion, flexibility, and communication. The results show that out of 70 data points, containing FTAs. Whereas, bald on record is the most dominant communication strategy used in the Walls family's communication in the movie. These findings indicate that FTAs are not only a matter of linguistic choice but also a reflection of deeper relationship problems in the family. The novelty of this research lies in the integration of FTA pragmatic analysis with the dysfunctional family communication model