caa a22 4500 388066911 CHVBK 20180307125135.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199903 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0959269500004440 doi S0959269500004440 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0959269500004440 Manno Giuseppe Etzelstrasse 35, CH-8038 Zürich, e-mail: manno@rom.unizh.ch Savoir refuser à l'écrit: analyse d'un enchaînement non préféré de macro-actes de discours [Elektronische Daten] [Giuseppe Manno] The aim of this article is to study rejection letters addressed to job applicants in France. Previous studies have predominantly dealt with the analysis of rejection in face-to-face interaction; but to date no empirical studies have focused on written refusals, especially in French. Moreover, although rejection letters represent bad news or dispreferred messages, researchers have devoted little attention to them in the light of Brown/Levinson's theory of politeness. To our knowledge, the only study on this subject is about characteristics of rejection letters and their impact on applicants' feelings about themselves, but Jablin and Krone (1984) adopt a psychological approach. The purpose of the present work is twofold. On the one hand, it is an attempt to provide both a description of the macro-structure of rejection letters and an inventory of the politeness strategies which appear in this discourse type. On the other hand, an attempt will be made to apply to our analysis of written discourse some tools which have been broadly applied in conversation analysis (preference organisation, adjacency pair, macro-speech act, etc.). Finally, it will be argued that in order to become more effective Brown/Levinson's theory must undergo a certain number of revisions: Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) should be analysed within a larger linguistic context in order to take into account quantitative aspects of politeness. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999 Journal of French Language Studies Cambridge University Press 9/1(1999-03), 39-68 0959-2695 9:1<39 1999 9 JFL https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269500004440 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269500004440 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Manno Giuseppe Etzelstrasse 35, CH-8038 Zürich, e-mail: manno@rom.unizh.ch NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of French Language Studies Cambridge University Press 9/1(1999-03), 39-68 0959-2695 9:1<39 1999 9 JFL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge