What's the Difference Between Positive and Negative Face?

Researchers Penelope Brown and Steven C. Levinson looked at how different languages deal with the idea of face-threatening acts. They found that in English, people ask questions they don't really want to know about but do it anyway as an indirect strategy. In Nahuatl, one way to be polite is to make something a causative and then detransitifies it again. And there are other ways to do this, to be indirect. The researchers also discovered that complimenting someone's negative face can actually be considered offensive by some cultures.