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Vronique Traverso

Aspects of polite behaviour in French and Syrian service encounters: A data-based comparative study

Keywords: ritual acts, conversational routines, French, Arabic, comparative study, service encounter

This paper presents a data-based comparative study of polite behaviour in French and Arabic (Syrian) service encounters. It focuses on the use of conversational routines and rituals, which are not only an important component of interactions in any service encounter, but also a prominent characteristic of Arabic interaction. The first part of the paper is devoted to a presentation of these two notions. The methodological problems raised by contrastive data analysis are then discussed, especially that of choosing comparable situations for conducting fieldwork, and of establishing a linguistic grid of reference for the contrastive analysis. The results of the study presented in part four lead to a discussion of what appear to be specific features of polite behaviour in the French and Syrian corpora. The corpora are composed of interactions audio-recorded in small shops.

Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 1612-5681
Volume: 2, 02/2006
Pages: 105 - 122

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