Ofrecimiento y cortesía en francés

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the speech act «offer» in French in the light of some assumptions proposed by Brown and Levinson in their theory of linguistic politeness. In order to do so, we analyse the effects of several linguistic formulations over the four faces that come into play in the interaction (the speaker's positive and negative face, and the addressee's positive and negative face). Although the speech act «offer» is defined both as a threatening act of the speaker and addressee's face and a flattering act of the speaker and addressee's face, the linguistic formulations bound lo carry out the act do not bring these relations into play similarly or with the same intensity. We conclude that offering in French implies threatening the other's territory and that the linguistic strategies routinized tend to minimize that threatening effect.