The relationship between negation and impoliteness in the exchanges d’information in French

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to explore linguistic impoliteness in French in the course of ordinary conversation and mostly in the exchange of information. Due to its highly functional character, the exchange of information is an ideal place to observe the relationship between language and culture. Through the study of interactional mechanisms (i.e. questionanswer), including the recurring negative sentence je ne sais pas moi (I do not know), we seek to discover what distinguishes this sentence from je ne sais pas (I don’t know). Why and in what type of situations – or when during the interaction – the speaker employs the former construction rather than the latter, or vice versa? What does he say? How about the social interaction effects? What do we learn of the speaker’s profile? The answers we bring to these questions indicate the importance of combining theoretical and methodological approaches and using the concepts of linguistic polyphony, conversation analysis, grammatical emotions and impoliteness.