Speech acts and politeness in French as a pluricentric language

This book is a contribution to a growing body of research in variational pragmatics and in postcolonial pragmatics, two emergent frameworks in cross-cultural pragmatics. Variational pragmatics studies pragmatic phenomena in regional varieties of the same language from a comparative perspective. Postcolonial pragmatics examines patterns of pragmatic phenomena in postcolonial spaces. The study focuses on the realization patterns of compliments and compliment responses and politeness strategies used in performing both speech acts in Cameroon French and in Canadian French.

Bernard Mulo Farenkia is Associate Professor of French and Linguistics and Coordinator of the French program at Cape Breton University in Canada.