Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French

by Kate Beeching

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Summary

This study aims to investigate politeness in women’s and men’s speech, with a particular focus on the use of c’est-à-dire, enfin, hein and quoi in contemporary spoken French . Politeness is defined as going beyond the notion of the face-threatening act, englobing both everyday ideas of politeness and the creation of sociability in face-to-face interaction.
The pragmatic particles studied are demonstrated to serve both psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic they lubricate reformulation and contribute to both sociability and social indexation.
The study, which combines qualitative and quantitative analysis, is based on a corpus of spontaneous spoken French, comprising 155,000 words, 95 interviews and subjects ranging in age from 7 to 88 years. The sample contains speakers from a broader range of educational backgrounds than is often the a butcher, a video-salesman and a toiletteur canin rub shoulders with counter assistants, teachers and doctors.

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