MOST FRENCH SOCIAL GATHERINGS take place around the table. What better place, then, to begin to study the highly social phenomenon of politeness in French. The party context provides a particularly interesting arena for the study of speech acts. In the context of a conversation, certain speech acts are likely to occur; the guests will most likely be introduced to one another, gifts may be offered to the hostess which must then be accepted and acknowledged, and compliments might be made on the meal and/or on the hostess's home. The focus of this paper will be on complimenting behavior in seven party conversations in French between native speakers of French and American advanced learners of French. The cross-cultural nature of the data under study in this paper provides a rich source from which one can extract valuable lessons in politeness which could contribute both to sociolinguistic and pedagogical descriptions of French speech acts. The data for this study consist of seven table conversations in French between American and French speakers. A modified version of Deborah Tannen's Thanksgiving dinner methodology, which was designed to study talk among friends in a social setting, was used to collect the data. Native speakers of French and American advanced non-native speakers of French were invited to each party and, with their prior permission, the conversations were audiotape-recorded. The first five parties were recorded in Strasbourg, France. The last two were recorded in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Each party lasted between three and four hours. The party guests were all Caucasian professionals. The Americans all possessed advanced competence in French-that is, they could express themselves with grammatical accuracy and with a fairly wide range of vocabulary and were sometimes mistaken for native speakers of French by the French. The guests at the first four conversations were all women; two were French and two were American. The last three parties were mixed-gender events: In Dinner 5, two of the guests were men and two were women, one man and one woman from each languagel culture group; in Dinners 6 and 7, three of the guests were men-two
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.