L’interculturel en classe de langue — analyse de corpus pour l’étude de différences et de ressemblances sémantiques du terme politesse en français et en polonais

Abstract

This paper investigates an attempt to apply a corpus analysis to the development of the intercultural approach to foreign language teaching through the semantic analysis of cultural keywords. Our analysis will specifically include the process of discovering the meaning of the three words: French politesse and its Polish equivalents — grzeczność and uprzejmość through their collocations collected in French and Polish corpora. As a result, firstly, we came up with a conclusion that the French word politesse is characterized by more positive semantic prosody than its Polish equivalents. Secondly, politesse appears more frequently in coordinate collocations with nouns conveying aesthetical meaning, whereas the Polish word uprzejmość is more frequently used with nouns designating ethical features. The principles of our methodology or some data used in our research can inspire the introduction of an inductive lexical approach in foreign language teaching to facilitate the conceptualization of complex cultural notions, which is the essential of the intercultural teaching.