Politeness in France: How To Buy Bread Politely

Requests in tourist information office service encounters

“…Consider the following examples of each request realisation taken from our data: Our findings, thus, confirm our first hypothesis in that most requests were performed directly by means of questions. In the same vein, they are in line with Kerbrat-Orecchioni's (2005) results in a French bakery setting, since her data revealed that, in most cases, the request was expressed as an assertion (Je vais prendre X) or a question (Vous avez X? ).…”

“…interrogative sentences in which information or action is demanded, they are straightforward and the request is formulated without mitigation. In previous research (Antonopoulou, 2001;Félix-Brasdefer, 2015;Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005), requests realised by means of questions were regarded as unmitigated formulae, and we followed this classification.…”

“…-Brasdefer's (2015) review of more than eighty studies on SEs reveals that most research on interactions in service encounters has taken place in commercial contexts, that is, settings in which monetary exchange takes place (Dumas, 2008). Some examples of the investigation in these settings include markets (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015;Solon, 2013), bakeries (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005), corner shops (Placencia, 2008), small shops (Traverso, 2007) and cafés Taylor, 2015 non-commercial SEs (without monetary transaction) is relatively more scarce, although some studies have been carried out in non-profit institutions, for example, in banks and information desks (Shively, 2013), student exchange offices (Torras & Gafaranga, 2002), post offices (Ventola, 1983;, or at the reference desk in college libraries (Downing, 2008). As suggested by Shively (2013), cultural variation may explain the differences in the degree of (in)directness of requests.…”

Requests in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish

“…As such, it is in line with Kong (1998), who examined particular service encounter transactions in Hong Kong and, more recently, Upadhyay (2003) who looked at requests in service encounters and other contexts in Nepal. In terms of looking at the transaction as a whole, it can also be said to be similar, for example, to Kerbrat-Orecchioni's (2005) study on transactions at the bakery in France.…”

Review of Aijmer (2011): Contrastive Pragmatics

“…In the L2 French data, on the other hand, they are mostly resorted to as acts of competition or conflict as a feature of the build-up of conflict. The study has an applied aim, namely, to provide guidelines that help learners avoid unfavorable cross-cultural judgments and unwitting stereotyping that may stem from an over-representation of interruptive turns (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1994, 2005House, 2005).…”