Politeness and impoliteness in French and in comparison with other languages (2023 IPrA conference, Bruxelles)

In France, work on linguistic (im)politeness in French originated in the research on cultural variation and invariants in verbal interactions carried out by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni in the 1990s. Using this politeness framework, pragmatics was used to address speech acts from a cross-cultural or intercultural perspective (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2000). This research gave rise to the examination of a variety of speech acts including compliments (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005), offers of and requests for information, requests (Béal 2010) and invitations (Traverso et al. 2018). Such pragmatic approaches to (im)politeness in French have also resulted in fieldwork in commercial sites such as bakeries, butchers, pharmacies, florists, shoe shops, etc. in France (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2001) and their comparison with speech act realizations in communities such as Syria (Traverso 2006), Lebanon and Tunisia (Dimachki and Hmed 2002). Recent developments on (im)politeness in the French-speaking world include comparative work based on corpora from electronic communication (Claudel 2021), in social media (Tobback 2019a,b) or which take speaker behavior as a starting point (Moallemi 2019).

With the present panel, we wish to further develop this research axis by gathering researchers working on the expression and perception of (im)politeness in French, as well as from a comparative perspective between French and another language (Beeching 2019). Propositions that focus on a comparative perspective are encouraged to highlight the points of convergence and differences in the behaviors observed in French data in comparison to practices observed in other languages and/or cultures. Studies on variations of French (Belgium, Cameroon, Canada, France, Switzerland, etc.) are especially welcomed. Propositions that deal with methodological and theoretical aspects of the study of (im)politeness in French and/or from a comparative perspective are also welcomed/encouraged.

Renowned politeness scholars Véronique Traverso and Kate Beeching have already accepted our invitation to participate in this panel.

Individual submissions should be made directly on the IPrA online platform.

—

References

Béal, Christine. 2010. Les interactions quotidiennes en français et en anglais. De l'approche comparative à l'analyse des situations interculturelles. Bern: Peter Lang.

Beeching, K. (2019). Apologies in French and English: An insight into conventionalisation and im/politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 142: 281-291.

Claudel, Chantal, 2021. L’E-Politesse dans les courriels en français et en japonais. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Dimachki, Loubna, & Neijete Hmed. 2002. ‘‘Bonjour madame!’’ ‘‘Bonjour mon frère!’’ Le système des termes d’adresse dans les interactions verbales en France, au Liban et en Tunisie. In Actes du VIIIe Congrès de l’Association pour la Recherche InterCulturelle (ARIC), 25-28 September 2001. Geneva: University of Geneva.

Kerbrat-Orecchioni Catherine, 2000. Les actes de langage dans une perspective interculturelle : problèmes théoriques et descriptifs. In Traverso, V. (Ed.), Perspectives interculturelles sur l’interaction, Lyon: PUL, 75-92.

Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 2001. Les actes de langage dans le discours. Théorie et fonctionnement. Paris: Nathan.

Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine, 2005. Le discours en interaction. Paris: Colin.

Moallemi, Shima. 2019. L2 socialization, construction of bilingual pragmatic competence and the Persian politeness system “ta’ârof”. In Szende T. & Aloa G. (Eds.), Pragmatic and Cross-Cultural Competences. Focus on Politeness. Brussels : Peter Lang, 219-233.

Tobback, Els, 2019a. L'autopromotion en contraste: une analyse sémantico-pragmatique des résumés LinkedIn publiés en France et aux Etats-Unis, Cahiers de praxématique 73 : 1-21.

Tobback, Els, 2019b. La modestie à la française à travers l’acte de l’éloge de soi : analyse comparative français / américain des procédés pragmatiques de modification utilisés dans les résumés Linkedin. Travaux de Linguistique 79/2 : 101-136.

Traverso, Véronique. 2006. Aspects of polite behavior in French and Syrian service encounters: A data-based comparative study. Journal of Politeness Research 2 (1): 105-123.

Traverso, Véronique, Ticca, Anna Claudia, & Ursi Biagio. 2018. Invitations in French: A complex and apparently delicate action. Journal of Pragmatics 125: 164-179.