The expression of politeness and modesty in the texts of the social sciences
Marie Fenclova – Helena Horova
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2017.10.01.05
Abstract
The intervention aims to present results of the analysis of a corpus of texts of the social sciences (such as: philosophy, linguistics, history, politics, sociology, anthropology) that contains some of the included extracts in the interactive didactic support (http://frodja.zcu.cz/). These teaching materials were conceived by a collective of the Department of Romance Languages of Philosophical Faculty in the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. We have enlarged this corpus by integrating monographs of French authors frequently quoted in texts of the social sciences, such as, among others: Pierre Bourdieu, Henriette Walter, Marcel Mauss. Above all, we would like remind some characteristics generally and traditionally taken into consideration in scientific texts. The concern of this study is the question of the absence of emotional / expressive functions that, in fact, betray the author's point of view and personality: when writing a scientific text, the author occupies the background of communication leaving the main object of communication exclusively in the first place. Once the study completed, we wanted to verify in our research if the corpus of scientific texts would confirm these characteristics traditionally mentioned.
Our study shows that the orator's “ego” is not systematically hidden which manifests itself particularly in the expressions of politeness and modesty. The list of the examples could be used during the creation of didactic materials of FOU (French for University Purposes).
Key words: corpus, text linguistic, analysis, FOU (French for University Purposes)