ACADEMIC RESOURCES ON POLITENESS IN FRENCH

Resources in this section curated by: Illena Trebont

Ruytenbeek, N. (2019). Do indirect requests communicate politeness? An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication. Journal of Politeness Research. 16. 10.1515/pr-2017-0026. 

This empirical study investigates the effect of power differences between interlocutors on the language that was used in emails to make a request. 122 native speakers of French were asked to write an email to ask for the recipient to contribute to a student journal. Half of the participants were instructed to write emails to another student while the other half of the participants were instructed to write an email to the Dean of Students. Results show that in emails to a person of higher status, students were more likely to use the formal pronoun vous, more formal greetings, and slightly more likely to use non-conventionalized request forms such as “Is it possible to VP (verb phrase)?”. Results also show that the native French speakers showed a strong preference for the conventionalized form “Can/could you VP?” in emails to people of higher and equal status, indicating that this strategy is most common in email requests. This study has important implications for teaching students about how to make requests via email.