La politesse et l'indirection : un essai de synthèse

Manno, Giuseppe

doi:10.3917/ls.100.0005

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Available literature concerning the production of requests by native speakers of French is scarce. French request forms have been studied by several authors (e.g., Roulet 1980;Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1994;Manno 2002), but unfortunately these contributions are not corpusbased and do not focus on authentic data.…”

Section: French Politenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do indirect requests communicate politeness?An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication

Ruytenbeek

2019

Journal of Politeness Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article addresses the relationship between linguistic politeness and addressee status in the performance of written requests in French. According to a first view, conventionalized Can you followed by a verbal phrase (in short, Can you VP?) “indirect requests” (IRs) are preferred because they enable speakers to convey politeness effects absent in imperatives. According to an alternative view, Can you VP? is the standard polite request form in written communication because it avoids impoliteness implications. To test these two competing hypotheses, I carried out a production task experiment with 122 native speakers of Belgian French writing email requests. In this experiment, addressee status was manipulated. An important finding is that higher addressee status does not increase the frequency of Can you VP? requests. Instead of using Can you VP? more often when they address higher status people, the participants used specific politeness markers such as formal greetings and the V-form of address. These results disconfirm the hypothesis that Can you VP? is used to convey extra politeness effects and suggests instead that people use such IRs to avoid the risk of being considered impolite.

show abstract

Section: French Politenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do indirect requests communicate politeness?An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication

Ruytenbeek

2019

Journal of Politeness Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…By contrast, few studies have addressed the form of requests in written French. French requests have been studied from a theoretical perspective (e.g., Manno, 2002), but, unfortunately, corpus-based contributions are lacking.…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests: An empirical contribution to the study of (im)politeness in French e-mail speech acts

Ruytenbeek

2019

Lexique

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite considerable attention to the politeness of French requests, to date, no study has been devoted to the lexical variation within one and the same politeness strategy. In an attempt to overcome this shortcoming, this paper addresses lexical and morphosyntactic modification in university students’ requests to lecturers. On the basis of a corpus of 150 French students’ request e-mails, it is observed, on the one hand, that a large majority of requests include lexical items that mitigate the face-threat entailed by the request speech act. This is somewhat surprising, as the context in which these requests are grounded entails a weak degree of threat to the negative face of the recipient lecturer. On the other hand, unlike the politeness marker please, the terms of address that characterize formal communication are not systematically present. The results of this corpus analysis demonstrate that, even though a limited number of request strategies are used by students, the wording of their e-mails contains some degree of lexical variation in their choice of verbs and their use of lexical items to modify their requests. I also propose a naturalistic method consisting in eliciting e-mail speech acts, which avoids the downsides of semi-controlled production tasks.

show abstract

Une approche socio-pragmatique du dys/fonctionnement du rituel des salutations en français

Oliveira

2020

SHS Web Conf.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ce travail porte sur le rituel des salutations dans les interactions sociales quotidiennes en contexte francophone. Sur la base d'un corpus de données authentiques - appréhendées selon une approche théorique combinée - nous nous proposons de démontrer dans quelle mesure la formule « bonjour » est une expression formelle et codifiée. Sa fonction étant de régler tout contact social, « bonjour » joue le rôle de garant de solidarité de l'individu et / ou d'appartenance de l'individu à son ou à cet environnement social de référence. En ce sens, « bonjour » est un performatif utilisé pour accomplir un acte institutionnel (i.e. saluer) lié à une convention humaine (i.e. Salutations). Parce que « bonjour » est le produit d’utilisation strictement dialogique, une fois cette formule adressée, une réponse sous forme d'une formule considérée comme une réponse équivalente est requise. En cas de dysfonctionnement, que se passe-t-il en termes de relations interpersonnelles / interculturelles ? Quelques résultats préliminaires suggèrent que dans certaines situations de communication, lorsque la symétrie de ce rituel est rompue et l'acte échoue, les locuteurs francophones métropolitains attribuent à [ce qu'ils entendent comme] la politesse une note plus élevée qu'à la coopération donnant lieu au phénomène inverse, c’est-à-dire, l'impolitesse.

show abstract

La politesse et l'indirection : un essai de synthèse

Cited by 10 publications

References 34 publications

Do indirect requests communicate politeness?An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication

Do indirect requests communicate politeness?An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication

Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests: An empirical contribution to the study of (im)politeness in French e-mail speech acts

Une approche socio-pragmatique du dys/fonctionnement du rituel des salutations en français

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About