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Savoir refuser à l'écrit: analyse d'un enchaînement non préféré de macro-actes de discours

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2008

Giuseppe Manno
Giuseppe Manno
Affiliation:
Etzelstrasse 35, CH-8038 Zürich, e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The aim of this article is to study rejection letters addressed to job applicants in France. Previous studies have predominantly dealt with the analysis of rejection in face-to-face interaction; but to date no empirical studies have focused on written refusals, especially in French. Moreover, although rejection letters represent bad news or dispreferred messages, researchers have devoted little attention to them in the light of Brown/Levinson's theory of politeness. To our knowledge, the only study on this subject is about characteristics of rejection letters and their impact on applicants' feelings about themselves, but Jablin and Krone (1984) adopt a psychological approach. The purpose of the present work is twofold. On the one hand, it is an attempt to provide both a description of the macro-structure of rejection letters and an inventory of the politeness strategies which appear in this discourse type. On the other hand, an attempt will be made to apply to our analysis of written discourse some tools which have been broadly applied in conversation analysis (preference organisation, adjacency pair, macro-speech act, etc.). Finally, it will be argued that in order to become more effective Brown/Levinson's theory must undergo a certain number of revisions: Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) should be analysed within a larger linguistic context in order to take into account quantitative aspects of politeness.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 39 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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