La politesse en milieu commercial à Abidjan: une étude d’actes de langage en contexte

Abstract

This dissertation explores politeness of verbal interactions in French that take place in small and medium-sized shops situated in Abidjan, the largest urban area in Côte d’Ivoire. Its analytical emphasis lies on requests; however, other speech acts are also taken into account as parts of the contexts where requests are uttered. The study has an empirical as well as a theoretical aim. The empirical aim is to collect linguistic data from commercial settings in Abidjan that can add new knowledge to our current understanding of the socio-pragmatic variation of requests in French. To pursue this aim, 200 verbal interactions containing 1140 requests were audio-video recorded. The theoretical aim is to test the frame-based approach to politeness, as proposed by Marina Terkourafi, on the collected data. The primary method for data collection was passive participant observation of naturally occurring interactions. The participants in the recorded interactions provided metadata about themselves, namely age, sex, profession and relationship to the interlocutor. This metadata, together with information about the cotext of the observed requests (interactional phase? solicited request? repeated request?) were used to construct independent variables in a descriptive statistical analysis. The dependent variables of the same analysis outlined the linguistic structure of requests. Qualitative case studies of face-work within specific frames completed the statistical analyses. Semi-structured interviews were also made with some participants, only to get information about the context of the recorded interaction, such as the social, economic, spatial and material reality of the setting. The empirical results show important differences in request behaviour between the studied interactions and request behaviour accounted for in previous research on requests in French. The theoretical analysis concludes that the frame-based view can explain occurrences of politeness, as well as some very rare occurrences of impoliteness and rudeness, in the data.