Bien sûr: Overemphasised agreement as a marker of politeness?

Abstract

This paper deals with the link between the French discourse marker bien sûr and linguistic politeness on the basis of Goffman’s concept of “face” and the theoretical models developed by Brown / Levinson and Kerbrat-Orecchioni. After describing the phrase from a morphological and semantic standpoint and showing how exaggeration and marked expression of politeness are intrinsically related, the study focuses on the phrase bien sûr as it is used in a recent corpus of spoken French (school meetings with teachers). The occurrences were employed as much in reactive position as in a monological concessive way. Starting from the “face-work” apparent in the examined interactions and the role the marker plays in terms of intersubjective (dis)alignment, the analysis seeks to determinate the extent to which bien sûr can be considered as a vehicle of “positive politeness” and / or “negative politeness”.