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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

« On remercie une fois encore » : Requests and anticipatory thanks in formal letters in L2 French

Résumé

Non-native speakers, in authentic and didactic settings, may be required to write formal letters. According to the CEFRL, advanced learners of L2 French are required to write argumentative essays and to adapt their speech to the appropriate register. This requires pragmatic skills, especially in accomplishing complex communicative goals related to politeness, such as formulating requests and thanks. This study, located at the interface between L2 acquisition and interlanguage pragmatics, seeks to observe and explain how L2 French learners express written politeness a situation characterized by formality and when addressing a hierarchically superior interlocutor. Requests are a well studied speech act from an interlanguage perspective (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999 ; Warga, 2005). A wide range of linguistic tools serve as mitigators in requests and thus contribute to politeness. Thanking is defined as "an act by which the speaker acknowledges receipt of any 'gift’ and expresses their gratitude to the person responsible for this gift" (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1997 : 132). In an epistolary context, thanks are generally anticipatory, since the receipt of the gift is hypothetical, and are therefore considered to be a form of indirect request (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1997). In this study, we analyse a corpus of 75 argumentative essays produced on the one hand by native French speakers, and on the other hand by four groups of L1 Chinese, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish learners. The texts were written based on a common prompt, namely, to write a formal letter addressed to the mayor of the city to persuade them not to cancel a cultural event. We compare the number of occurrences of explicit requests and thanks in the essays, as well as their place in the text structure. Then, we analyse the linguistic forms used to express these objectives, namely markers of deontic modality, lexical variety as well as formulaic language. Results indicate that the “explicit request without anticipatory thanks” pattern is the most frequent among native writers. Learners, on the other hand, overuse requests and thanks, as well as the politeness marker “s’il vous plait”, which mitigates the use of imperative mode. Regarding the linguistic forms, native writers differ from learners in their use of formulaic language, which confirms existing research on this subject. Variations also appear among the learners in terms of politeness markers. The contrasts suggest possible influences of the L1 and the effects of teaching, but also learner strategies in the expression of politeness in L2 writing. This study could be supplemented by an analysis of the corpora available in the learners' L1s. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999). Exploring the Interlanguage of Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Research Agenda for Acquisitional Pragmatics. Language Learning, 49(4), 677–713. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (1997). Le traitement des actes de langage en analyse des conversations : l'exemple du remerciement. In Dialogue Analysis: Units, Relations and Strategies Beyond the Sentence. Weigand, E. & Hauenherm (éd.), De Gruyter Warga, M. (2005). “Je serais très merciable”: Formulaic vs. Creatively Produced Speech in Learners’ Request-Closings. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 67–93.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04160175 , version 1 (12-07-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04160175 , version 1

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Sülün Aykurt-Buchwalter, Tatiana Aleksandrova. « On remercie une fois encore » : Requests and anticipatory thanks in formal letters in L2 French. 18th International Pragmatics Conference, Jul 2023, Brussels, Belgium. ⟨hal-04160175⟩

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