Bernard Mulo Farenkia

By Bernard Mulo Farenkia

This chapter discusses aspects of Cameroon French pragmatics, with focus on gratitude expressions. The chapter presents the taxonomy of patterns employed by Cameroon French speakers to express their gratitude to friends, strangers, and superiors/professors. Cameroon French speakers are found to express their gratitude directly or indirectly using a wide range of linguistic and pragmatic strategies, and the expressions employed mostly occur in speech act sets, which generally involve combinations of direct and indirect gratitude expressions and supportive acts. The results also reveal the use of nominal address terms to modify the illocutionary force of gratitude expressions. Overall, the linguistic and pragmatic choices made by Cameroon French speakers vary according to degree of familiarity and power distance between the interlocutors. The study adds to a growing body of research on Cameroon French pragmatics.

Part of the book: Heritage

By Bernard Mulo Farenkia

This study examines the production of offer refusals in native and non-native French. Data were obtained through written discourse completion tasks by a group of Canadian learners of French as a second language, a group of L1 French speakers, and a group of English native speakers. The aim was to compare offer refusal strategies in French L1, French L2, and English L1 and to locate traces of pragmatic transfer in L2 French refusal behavior. Significant differences were found between the French L1 speakers and the French L2 learners with respect to the use of direct refusals, indirect refusals, and adjuncts to refusals. For instance, it was found that the French L2 learners use a very limited repertoire of linguistic realizations to express the inability to accept offers. At the level of indirect refusals, the results reveal some similarities between the L2 French learners, the L1 French speakers, and the L1 English speakers: the three groups use reasons more often than any other strategy in their refusal utterances. Differences emerge, however, in the linguistic realization of this pragmatic category. Implications of the findings for L2 French pedagogy were also discussed.

Part of the book: Second Language Acquisition

By Bernard Mulo Farenkia

This article presents the results of an analysis of apology strategies in native and non-native French in Canadian context. The data used were obtained through a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire that was completed by a group of native French speakers (FL1) and a group of learners of French as a second language (FL2). The goal was to identify and compare pragmatic and linguistic choices made by both groups when apologizing in three different situations. Several differences and similarities emerged between the two groups regarding the use of exclamations to introduce apologies, direct apologies, indirect apologies, and supportive acts. For instance, it was found that the FL1 speakers used “expressions of regret”, “offers of apology” 15 and “requests for forgiveness” to apologize directly, while the FL2 speaking informants used 16 only “expressions of regret” and “offers of apology”. While the respondents of both groups 17 mostly chose “offers of repair” to apologize indirectly, they displayed divergent preferences 18 regarding the use of other indirect apology strategies. Differences were also documented 19 with respect to the use of intensification devices in direct apologies and the use of supportive acts. Implications of the findings for L2 French pedagogy were also discussed.

Part of the book: Second Language Acquisition - Learning Theories and Recent Approaches [Working title]