What are common politeness strategies in French arguments

Common politeness strategies in French arguments emphasize indirectness, mitigating face-threatening acts, and upholding social harmony. French argumentative discourse often relies on rhetorical politeness, where speakers carefully manage their linguistic choices to avoid blunt confrontation and preserve mutual respect.

Key strategies include:

• Using modal verbs and epistemic modality to soften statements (e.g., “il me semble que” it seems to me that).
• Avoiding direct negation or commands, preferring indirect forms or questions.
• Employing euphemisms or circumlocutions to express disagreement or criticism gently.
• Inserting politeness markers like “s’il vous plaît” please, “excusez-moi” excuse me, or “je vous prie” I beg you within arguments.
• Employing hedging phrases that signal openness to other viewpoints.
• Including diplomatic expressions or flattery to soothe potential tensions.

French argumentative style values the balance between expressing one’s position and maintaining the “face” of interlocutors, often realized through subtle lexical and prosodic means that reveal politeness intentions indirectly. This aligns with theories of politeness in linguistic pragmatics, particularly Brown and Levinson’s framework, adapted to French cultural and linguistic norms. ^{1, 2, 3}

References

• Prosody, polyphony and politeness. A polyphonic approach to prosodic configurations common to French and Spanish

• Linguistic politeness across Arabic, French, and English languages

• De l’argumentation à la politesse: l’étude des stratégies discursives de persuasion dans la critique de cinéma

• Argumentative Strategies in French Company Brochures

• Hybrid Perspectives: Muslim and Secular Discourses in French Politics

• FEATURES OF MUSIC TEACHER TRAINING IN FRENCH UNIVERSITIES: INTERVENANT MUSICIAN

• Politeness Strategies in the Context of Argument In Japanese Debate Shows

• Text structure and politeness in French and English corporate brochures

• Intellectuals and the Corona Crisis: From Self-Reflection to Criticism of the Political and Strategies of Globalization

• Directness vs. indirectness: A contrastive pragmatic analysis of request formulation in Spanish and in French

• Comparing Styles across Languages: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Politeness

• Prière, remerciement et politesse en ancien français : vostre merci, multes merciz, merci !

• TyDiP: A Dataset for Politeness Classification in Nine Typologically Diverse Languages

• Facilitating the Communication of Politeness through Fine-Grained Paraphrasing

• Politeness-induced semantic change: The case of quand même

• “Do you wanna talk about impoliteness? How rude!”. Introduction

• The Positive Politeness Strategies Found In Ferdinand Movie 2017

• An Analysis of Positive Politeness Strategies on You Tube Video Entitled “Ariana Grande I Full Video”

• The Handshake Layer Cake: Meeting and Regreeting Difficulties for a Non-French Surgeon in France.

• TyDiP: A Dataset for Politeness Classification in Nine Typologically Diverse Languages

• A Pragmatic Analysis on Politeness Strategies Used in Online Class

• TYPES OF POLITENESS IN ENGLISH: LINGUISTIC ASPECTS AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

• Introduction to Politeness and Impoliteness Research in Global Contexts

• Polite Requests of Indonesian Learners of FLE and French Native Speakers: An Interlanguage Study

• Translation Techniques and Bald on Record Politeness Strategy

• Politeness Transfer: A Tag and Generate Approach

• (Des)cortesía y argumentación en el discurso de políticos (relaciones México-Cuba)

• THE JOURNAL OF THE LINGUISTIC ASSOCIATION OF THE SOUTHWEST

• Modalité épistémique et discours scientifique

• The Advancement of Women to Top Management Positions in the Human Resource Management Domain : A time for Change ?

• GenPADS: Reinforcing politeness in an end-to-end dialogue system

• Politeness Strategies through Language Power and Style-Based Communication

• Being impolite while pretending to be polite. The rupture of politeness conventions in electoral debates

• LINGUISTIC ASPECT OF THE CATEGORY OF POLITENESS IN ADVERTISING DISCOURSE

• Positive politeness strategies during online learning: A cyberpragmatic study