This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

This study provides an account of the puzzling difference in case marking of the object of two-argument verbs like aider (accusative) and obéir (dative) in French. Cross-linguistically, these two verb types usually mark their object identically (e.g., accusative in English, dative in German), but French historically shows divergent trajectories. Employing logistic regression modelling and clustering techniques, this corpus-based study examines 77 verbs over 1000 years of textual record to show that aider-type verbs and obéir-type verbs systematically diverge in their case selection by the 16th century and that they have been stable ever since. We argue that their trajectories reflect the narrowing of an oblique linking rule, defined in terms of Talmy’s theory of force dynamics, which targets the difference between helping and hindering verbs on the one hand and verbs of reacting and resisting on the other. The analysis dispels long-held views that the diachronic changes were random or based strictly on analogy, and methodologically, it provides an empirical basis for connecting historical change to developmental approaches to grammar.

We present results from a qualitative analysis illustrating how people handle criticism in a workplace environment, including both the production of and responses to criticism. Our data comes from responses provided by 80 participants in a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) in French. In the scenarios, relative power (equal vs. hierarchical) and social distance (close vs. distant) were manipulated. Our analysis focuses on three recurrent patterns. First, we illustrate how criticism and replies to criticism are the product of several speech acts, in line with the concept of speech act set. Second, we argue that criticism and replies to criticism are both impacted by external and internal downgrading and upgrading strategies. Third, we give examples of how pronouns can be used to increase or decrease the level of politeness. Our findings provide new insights into the preferred linguistics strategies for criticizing and responding to criticism in French.

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that, in French as in other gender-marked languages, masculine generic terms tend to induce a male bias in the readers’ mental representations of the person referred to. The current study investigates whether this bias extends to hybrid nouns, a particular class of nouns with a fixed grammatical gender that can refer to either a man or a woman (e.g. “une personne”, ‘aFEM personFEM’, or “un individu”, ‘anMASC individualMASC’). We used a sentence evaluation paradigm where participants had to judge the acceptability of a sentence describing a character of a specific gender, either male or female, following a context sentence containing a hybrid noun. The results revealed that masculine hybrid nouns yielded faster processing of male continuation sentences, with response times 130 ms shorter than for female continuations on average. In contrast, no such difference was observed for feminine hybrid nouns. These results point to an asymmetry in the processing of grammatical gender: while feminine hybrid forms do not influence gender representation, masculine hybrid forms tend to elicit a male bias.

In this article, the forms and role of compliments in French are analysed to identify preferred behaviours in two types of discourse. Forty-five instances of compliments were extracted from everyday interactions and 83 instances from television programmes (talk-shows and talent shows). The linguistic-discursive approach used provides the key to understanding these corpora, revealing processes specific to each genre. In everyday interaction, the use of situational deictics, onomatopoeia, dislocated forms, elliptical structures or the intensifier ‘too’ in its high degree value is favoured, whereas in television programmes, it is rather the high degree of axiological praise, the repetition or successive use of adverbs, or the amplification of paraverbal and extraverbal signals (emphatic intonation or detachment of syllables in certain key terms) are preferred. It shows that ordinary interactions give priority to situational anchoring and a certain spontaneity, whereas television programmes tend to intensify the expression of compliments to capture the audience’s attention by turning exchanges into a spectacle.

Se basant sur un corpus de 1800 tweets, cet article compare deux constructions verbales du français informel : la construction pronominale se taper (ex. se taper une randonnée, se taper la gastro, se taper une bonne bouteille) et la construction active taper (ex. taper un foot, taper un coma, taper un grec), une variante plus récente qui semble gagner du terrain dans le langage des jeunes sur les réseaux sociaux. En s’appuyant sur les résultats de notre étude, nous montrerons que ces deux constructions se distinguent au niveau (i) de la fréquence et de l’ouverture lexicale des emplois que celles-ci ont en commun, (ii) des restrictions sémantiques et morphosyntaxiques imposées sur le syntagme nominal sélectionné, et (iii) des nuances sémantiques véhiculées par ces deux formes verbales. Nous montrerons que ces nuances sémantiques tiennent au fait que les emplois pronominaux mettent principalement en oeuvre des constructions datives tandis que les emplois actifs sont des extensions du sens de base du verbe.

Cet article d’introduction présente l’ambition et la contribution de ce numéro thématique consacré aux travaux sur l’im/politesse en langue française. L’article contextualise et présente cinq études empiriques qui illustrent la vitalité du champ : l’étude historique des rapports de pouvoir entre maîtres et domestiques par Paternoster, la comparaison des compliments ordinaires et médiatiques de Claudel et Moallemi, l’étude constructionnelle de l’insulte chez Van Olmen et Grass, les stratégies de critique professionnelle de Bersier et al., et enfin la comparaison de l’auto-éloge en français hexagonal et en anglais étasunien par Tobback et Moens. En faisant dialoguer ces travaux, l’introduction démontre que la gestion des faces positive et négative ne dépend pas de simples calculs stratégiques, mais de normes sociales et de genres discursifs spécifiques. Le numéro thématique dans son ensemble souligne la nécessité de prendre en compte la multimodalité, les nouveaux médias et la diversité des variétés du français à travers le monde, positionnant ce numéro thématique comme un jalon essentiel pour les futures recherches dans les domaines de l’analyse du discours et de la pragmatique du français.

This article revisits the provenance of the preverbal imperfective aspect marker ka, which characterizes the French-lexicon creoles of the Lesser Antilles and French Guiana and sets them apart from those of Haiti, Louisiana, and the Indian Ocean, which instead employ reflexes of après ‘after’. The origin of ka is controversial and still not properly understood. We argue that earlier proposals have focused too narrowly on the syntactic properties of the alleged source constructions, while neglecting semantic and functional motivations. We show that the emergence of ka follows the well-attested Location Schema, i.e. the grammaticalization pathway from locative predication to progressive aspect, and identify the French locative construction n’(en) être qu’à X ‘to be only at X’ as the most plausible source. In addition to its semantic aptness, the perceptual salience of this construction made it an ideal candidate for grammaticalization in a creolizing context. We bolster our argumentation by means of typological data from creoles and non-creoles. By situating ka within this broader typological framework, the article not only solves a much-debated etymological puzzle, but also demonstrates that, although creoles innovate, the cognitive-semantic mechanisms shaping their grammars are essentially the same as those shaping ‘traditional’ languages.