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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Politeness Research Année : 2020

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

Nicolas Ruytenbeek

Résumé

This paper 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? interrogatives. Instead of using Can you VP? more often when they address higher status people, speakers use 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.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-03123952 , version 1 (09-02-2021)

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Nicolas Ruytenbeek. Do indirect requests communicate politeness? An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication. Journal of Politeness Research, 2020, 16 (1), pp.111-142. ⟨10.1515/pr-2017-0026⟩. ⟨hal-03123952⟩
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