Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests : an empirical contribution to the study of im/politeness in French e-mail speech acts

Despite considerable attention to the politeness of French requests, to date, no study has been devoted to the lexical variation within one and the same politeness strategy. In an attempt to overcome this shortcoming, this paper addresses lexical and morphosyntactic modification in university students’ requests to lecturers. On the basis of a corpus of 150 French students’ request e-mails, it is observed, on the one hand, that a large majority of requests include lexical items that mitigate the face-threat entailed by the request speech act. This is somewhat surprising, as the context in which these requests are grounded entails a weak degree of threat to the negative face of the recipient lecturer. On the other hand, unlike the politeness marker please, the terms of address that characterize formal communication are not systematically present. The results of this corpus analysis demonstrate that, even though a limited number of request strategies are used by students, the wording of their e-mails contains some degree of lexical variation in their choice of verbs and their use of lexical items to modify their requests. I also propose a naturalistic method consisting in eliciting e-mail speech acts, which avoids the downsides of semi-controlled production tasks.

Publication year:2019

Accessibility:Open