Abstract

Politeness is culture-specific and context sensitive. Usually, speakers of a language community acquire strategies of politeness from their ongoing discussions with each other in daily life. That is why what is polite in a community can be considered rude in another and what is polite in a particular context could be rude in another. This article offers a particularly pragmatic study on the politeness of the speech acts of query. This study examines the politeness of the request strategies carried out by French native speakers. Participated by 10 native speakers as referees, it examines the politeness according to the encoding scheme developed in Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989) modified by Warga (2005). Using Discourse Completion Test (DCT) for data collection, this research, at the same time, focuses on the internal change of request adapted by Jin Ah (2012). It consists of 6 situations selected conversations of Reiter (2000). Social variables corresponding to 3 systems of politeness of Scollon and Scollon (2001) also became the basis of the analysis in this study. The results of our research have shown that French native speakers tend to make their request for conventional indirect strategy by the use of the interrogative sentence. The sub-strategy which was used is question on a condition of success dominated by the question on the ability. While most of the internal changes to show politeness is the use of the conditional mode. These findings could have implications for the learners of French as foreign language, teachers, authors of textbooks, syllabus designers and researchers.

Keywords

politeness, query, strategies, changes, French

References