Abstract:
The following study is in keeping with exchanging compliments as a social act institutionalised by the place where they happen. Politeness being defined by a code revealed through some social
formulas devoted to respectful and balanced exchanges among the interacting people. We considered politeness as a linguistic act considered as a ritual in the French as a foreign Language class, bringing some meaning at every time of the exchanges, from the moment when the teachers and the students meet to the time they part. It is a question of a system of ceremonial acts and communication whose aim is to establish contact and to maintain it in a tone selected
according to their age, their status, their respective positions, their mutual relationship and their sexes. Hence, we have used pragmatics data and the sociolinguistic approach as the main analysis of our corpus. Our research method is based on three ways of analysis: the class observation, a pattern of observation and the questionnaire; one for the teachers and the other for students.
The results of the study have shown that politeness, in the class of French as a foreign language, is expressed daily through the use of some formulas as: Bonjour, au revoir, s’il vous plait, merci , and through some
specific attitudes: smiling, a wave of the hand, a shake of the head...concurrently to these statements, there also exist a large scale of behaviours of mimics and gestures and of representation which consists in sparing an image of the self displayed by the interlocutors in order to avoid potential threatening, and in case of transgression, to repair the prejudices. It is a real game of ritual strategies of interaction, in
occurrence: of reparation and avoidance. We came to the conclusion that these acts of deference submit to some variations; depending on whether the individuals interacting are old or younger, depending on their status
and their position in the class, in accordance with the nature of the relations established among themselves and in particular they undergo the impact of the difference of gender: masculine / feminine.
