Verbal behaviour of Tlemcen speech community: Socio-pragmatic investigation in light of politeness theory

Abstract

Sociocultural norms govern the social life of any community. They determine how each individual behaves verbally in the various social interactions that occur mainly through language. The purpose of this paper is to describe how interlocutors in the Tlemcen community act, react and interact verbally in different social situations. This contribution seeks to answer the following question: how do the Tlemcenian interlocutors manage their mutual faces? Various natural conversations of everyday life have been recorded and then transcribed, collected in buses, parks, mosques and family meeting. For this we have mainly resorted to the theory of politeness, notably the model of Brown and Levinson and that of Watts. The results showed some peculiarities of this behaviour: the Tlemcenian adopted certain specific strategies regarding the management of faces, in particular those of threatening act.