Linnéa Koré

About Linnéa Koré

Thesis Project

In my thesis project, I explore the politeness mechanisms found in the type of French spoken in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. French is widely used in Abidjan, and as a linguistic variety, it is formed by its context and use. The corpus on which the study is based consists of video-recorded interactions in various service situations, i.e. naturally occurring data where I have not staged the dialogues for the purposes of my research. I have also interviewed some of the recorded individuals, both on the theme of linguistic politeness and about their ideas of what went on in the recorded interactions.

Politeness researchers often study the formulation of requests, for example because such speech acts may reflect social values. My analysis, too, focuses on requests with an aim to be able to compare the results with previous research, in particular within the French and African language areas. My study comprises a qualitative and a quantitative part. In the qualitative part, I analyse not only requests per se but also the entire interactions and the contexts in which they occur in order to explain politeness phenomena and the role of requests therein.

This way of studying the context, the perspectives of the participants and the function of politeness in the interactions can be described as a discursive approach within the field of politeness research, which increasingly seems to be considered a multidisciplinary research field in its own right.

Background

I started my post-secondary studies by taking courses in French and French cultural studies for two semesters at the University of Perpignan. In a next step, I obtained two Master’s degrees – one in translation studies and one in French – from the University of Gothenburg. Over the years, I have also worked in several different non-academic fields in Sweden, France, the UK and the Ivory Coast.

Teaching

So far, I have taught phonetics, academic presentation, French literature: text and other media, oral proficiency in French, tandem French-Swedish, translation, translation theory and French for Humanities and Social Sciences.