Teasing at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of face work in performing and responding to teases ALAN PARTINGTON Abstract In this article, I examine teasing in the laughter-talk of two transcribed spoken corpora of press briefings held at the White House, one from the Democrat and one from the Republican administrations. Categorizations are developed, firstly, of types and functions of teases and, secondly, of types and functions of responses to teases, as produced by both the podium and the assembled press. Important implications for face/(im)politeness theory become apparent. Speakers appear to have two di¤erent kinds of face, competence and a¤ective. The problem for any given individual is that the two types of face work are frequently incompatible. Bolstering the one type of face may well diminish the other, and careful considerations are necessary when indulging in teasing of others (or indeed oneself ) and in calibrating how to respond to being teased. The article is intended as a con- tribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Keywords: teasing; corpora; politeness; laughter; politics; corpus-assisted discourse studies. 1. Defining teasing 1.1. Defining teasing 1: Authentic uses of teasing in corpora In their review of the literature, Keltner et al. (2001: 229) bemoan the lack of an operational definition of teasing, noting how it is often ‘con- flated with, humor, play, irony, sarcasm and bullying’. Kowalski (2004: 331) too remarks how ‘until recently surprisingly little research attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of teasing, and existing research has been plagued by conceptual disparities and relatively atheoretical 1860–7330/08/0028–0771 Text & Talk 28–6 (2008), pp. 771–792 Online 1860–7349 DOI 10.1515/TEXT.2008.039 6 Walter de Gruyter