🗣️ 32. Politeness and hedging

Speakers rarely say exactly what they want with full force. They soften requests, show deference, mark closeness, cushion a refusal; and they adjust how strongly they commit to what they say. French has one of the best-known politeness systems in Europe, the choice between tu and vous, which the speaker must make every time they address one person. This chapter describes it, its history and its sociolinguistics; the terms of address and the formulas; the softening devices of requests (the conditional and imperfect of politeness); letters and e-mails; impoliteness; hedging, boosting and the expression of the speaker's commitment (epistemic modality and evidentiality); and the counts that the open French treebanks give for them (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06).

Contents

1. Politeness and face
2. Tu and vous
3. History of tu and vous
4. Tu and vous in the treebanks
5. Other address: names, titles, vocatives, on, the third person
6. Softening requests: the conditional and the imperfect
7. Formulas of politeness
8. Letters and e-mails
9. Impoliteness
10. Hedging and boosting
11. Epistemic modality and evidentiality
12. Politeness across varieties and registers
13. How Mova handles it

1. Politeness and face

The standard frame is Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness as the management of face: the positive face is the wish to be approved of and liked; the negative face is the wish to be free to act and not be imposed upon. A request threatens the hearer's negative face, a criticism the positive face, a compliment can threaten the negative face of the receiver who must respond. Politeness is the set of strategies by which speakers lessen the threat: positive politeness (closeness, shared ground, praise) and negative politeness (deference, distance, indirectness, apology).

French fits the frame well and pushes some of it into the grammar. The tu/vous contrast is a built-in index of social distance; the conditional and the imperfect are grammatical means of indirectness (section 6); the vocabulary of address and of formulas is rich (sections 5 and 7). Kerbrat-Orecchioni's French work on the "politeness of interaction" and the theory of face is the French-language counterpart of the Brown–Levinson frame; both are known to us only by name here and are not relied on. The older public-domain grammars treat politeness as a question of civilité du langage, and the historical grammar of Nyrop (1899, nyrop-1899-grammaire-historique-de-la) has a long section on the forms of address that remains the fullest account in our library.

French also differs by the weight it gives to politeness formulas. In a French shop, one greets (Bonjour, madame) before one asks; in an office, a message without a salutation and a closing formula reads as rude; in a service encounter, merci and au revoir are obligatory exchanges. A system that takes a request without its framing will misread both the act and the stance (see chapter 31).

2. Tu and vous

French has two second-person pronouns for one addressee:

The verb tutoyer means "to address with tu", vouvoyer "to address with vous"; the nouns are tutoiement and vouvoiement. The act of switching is passer au tutoiement, on se tutoie ?.

2.1 What decides the choice

There is no single rule, and the choice is negotiated. The table below is the standard sociolinguistic description (Brown and Gilman 1960; Coveney 2010 is cited in the bibliography of Sperlich et al. 2016), not a result of our counts. The factors that sociolinguistics identifies, from the classic study of power and solidarity (Brown & Gilman 1960) to the French work, are:

The traditional norms were reciprocal in the family or in intimacy and non-reciprocal in rank: the servant said vous and was addressed with tu. Nyrop (1899) records the situation at the end of the nineteenth century: husband and wife in general use tu, though they might use vous in company or before servants; parents and children were generally reciprocal in tu, but the children's vous to their parents was still alive in aristocratic and old bourgeois families; brother and sister used tu, though literature kept vous between them; in the army the soldiers addressed one another with tu and their superiors with vous, and officers were required to say vous to their men, although in wartime many officers said tu to their men; and Nyrop adds the point that vous said in a situation that calls for tu gives the same shock as the reverse (he quotes a war novel in which a soldier is addressed with vous by a comrade and "the atmosphere turns", gare, il lui avait dit « vous », les choses allaient se gâter). That is the general mechanism: the choice signals the relation and the switch signals a change of relation, for better or worse.

In current French the tu has spread in many domains; a common description, repeated by sociolinguists and not measured by us, is that tu has become the default among people under about thirty, in many companies and shops, among colleagues, in sport, in political movements and in social media. Vous remains the form of address to strangers older than the speaker, to superiors, to clients (by the service provider) and in all formal writing. Who proposes the switch to tu is itself regulated: the person with the higher status, the elder, or the woman is expected to propose it (On peut se tutoyer ?, Tu peux me tutoyer, On se tutoie, non ?).

2.2 The learner's view

The choice is a standard difficulty for learners. Sperlich, Leem and Ahn (2016, sperlich-2016-interaction-politeness-systems-korean-learners) studied 54 Korean learners of French (age 20–30, levels A2 to C1) with a discourse completion task (production) and an error correction task (reception), together with native-speaker control groups, French (30) and Korean (30). Korean has a pronoun of address that is used in familiar request situations (nuh) and honorific forms that play the part of vous. The authors found that the learners handled tu without difficulty (a positive transfer from Korean), and that vous was clearly more problematic (a negative transfer). They also found that the learners' pragmalinguistic knowledge (the forms) and their sociopragmatic knowledge (the situations in which a form is appropriate) differed in whether it was explicit or implicit, and that the two kinds of task revealed different parts of it. For a description of French this says that the pair is not just a pronoun choice; it carries a body of knowledge about the relation that a speaker acquires in interaction, not from a rule.

2.3 Agreement and the polite singular vous

The polite singular vous takes plural verb forms but its predicate agrees in the singular with the person addressed: Vous êtes content (to a man), Vous êtes contente (to a woman), but Vous êtes contents (to several). The same holds for participles in compound tenses with être and for reflexives: Vous êtes arrivée à l'heure. So the polite singular is visible in the agreement of the predicate, and the gender of the hearer is visible when the predicate has a gender. On the French treebanks, counting the predicate adjectives and participles whose subject is vous (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06):

In Rhapsodie, whose recordings of interviews are conversations between a journalist and a guest, all 44 predicates with vous are singular and 13 are feminine (vous étiez un peu choquée quand même, hein, Rhap_D2007-1, said to a woman; vous étiez content, Rhap_D0006-136, said to a man). The singular agreement is the best cue in the text for a polite vous, and the only reliable one, since the pronoun is the same as the plural. The gender, when it appears, is a cue to who is addressed (chapter 35).

The same agreement shows in the first person: the nous de modestie of authors and of speakers who use the plural for themselves (Nous pensons que …) takes a singular predicate (Nous sommes persuadé que …), the nous de majesté of kings (Nous, Roi de France, …) too. Both are literary or administrative in modern usage.

3. History of tu and vous

Vous as a polite singular comes from late Latin, where the plural vos was used to one person who was an emperor. Nyrop (1899) notes that the Roman emperors from Diocletian on used the plural in speaking of themselves (the pluralis majestatis), and that the plural of address to one person followed. In medieval French the use of vous to one person for respect is established; tu and vous alternate in the same text for the same person, even in the work of the strict poet and grammarian Malherbe (Je vous suis obligé de ce que vous avez fait pour mon fils … Il n'est pas à cette heure question si ce que tu as fait m'a profité).

In the seventeenth century, Nyrop writes, tu lost ground in literature and vous triumphed definitively as the pronoun of politeness, under the influence of the court. In the classical tragedy tu is used between lovers, to confidants and servants, and to the gods; Corneille uses it more than Racine does. The heroes say vous to the heroines and the heroines say tu to the heroes in Corneille, because the lady of the courtly tradition can use a protective familiarity that the lover cannot return (Nyrop cites the interpretation of Larroumet). In life, tu was the form of the superior to the inferior, of scorn or anger; Brunot (1906, vol. 3, brunot-1906-histoire-de-la-langue) cites the grammarian Maupas, who writes that the French use tu only to their subjects and inferiors, or in disdain and anger, and notes that children, "accustomed to forestall each other with honour", did not use tu among themselves; Nyrop adds that the solitaries of Port-Royal never used tu to one another. Boileau's tu to Arnauld, to Guilleragues and to the Great King, Brunot adds, is not a sign of familiarity but of respect, a poetic use that goes with the use of tu in prayer and in the address to a dead person, to oneself, or to one's soul.

At the Revolution tu became a symbol of equality: Brunot (1922, brunot-1922-la-pensee-et-la) notes that tutoiement became a mark of civic virtue and was theoretically compulsory. The effect was short-lived; the nineteenth-century norms that Nyrop describes are the bourgeois return to vous. The twentieth century saw a long, gradual shift toward tu in the family (the disappearance of the child's vous to parents), at school, at work and among the young. The first-person plural has a parallel history, from which the French of today keeps the on for nous (section 5.4 and chapter 35); Nyrop explains the on as a means of avoiding the first-person pronoun, which is felt as too direct: on is "effaced, prudent and modest", a way of not mixing oneself in the affairs of others or mixing others in one's own.

4. Tu and vous in the treebanks

Counts of the second-person pronouns as PRON tokens in the open treebanks (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06; forms as the treebank lemmatises them; t' is the elided te):

The register is clear. A text addressed to an unknown public (a review, a notice, a news item, a parliamentary speech) uses vous; a story told to a friend in Paris uses tu six times as often as vous; a recorded interview, in which a journalist addresses a guest, goes the other way. The vous of the written corpus is not always the polite singular: in the reviews of GSD the vous mostly addresses the reader at large, as a plural or as a generic "you" (Si vous passez à Châteauneuf-du-Pape …, fr-ud-train_01975). The annotation of Polite in the MISC column (described in chapter 30) confirms how rarely a polite singular can be identified: 70 of 649 annotated tokens, or 11%, are marked Polite=Yes.

Terms of address. The relation vocative marks a term of address that is not part of the clause. The numbers are small: GSD 15, ParisStories 16, Rhapsodie 41, Sequoia 53 (per 10 000 tokens: 0.4, 3.7, 9.3, 7.5). By form, the vocatives of Rhapsodie are maître (7), monsieur (4), first names (Emmanuelle, Valérie, Sébastien, Pierre, Françoise, 2 or 3 each) and compatriotes (3); in ParisStories madame (3), monsieur (2), mamie (2), meuf (1), mademoiselle, enfants; in GSD monsieur, madame, Charlie, rabbi, shérif, gars, fils. The register of the vocative is thus a cue too: a title and the polite form in the interview, a first name or a family term or an informal word (meuf, gars) in the stories.

The words monsieur, madame, maître. Monsieur occurs 14 times in GSD, 4 in ParisStories, 12 in Rhapsodie and 40 in Sequoia; madame 14, 4, 0 and 18; maître (the title of a lawyer, Maître Untel; also "master") 46, 3, 9 and 4; docteur and professeur 66, 4, 5 and 3. Only a minority of those are vocatives; most are in a name phrase (Madame Tellier est une excellente comptable que je recommande vivement !, fr-ud-test_00263) or a title in a news item. Sequoia's 40 monsieur are mostly the Europarl formula Monsieur le Président and similar (not checked one by one).

5. Other address: names, titles, vocatives, on, the third person

5.1 Names and titles

The title with the surname is not interchangeable with first name alone: Bonjour, Madame Martin is a polite greeting; Bonjour, Madame is also polite and does not need the name; Bonjour, Hélène belongs to the tu world, though not always (many French workplaces use first names with vous: Bonjour Hélène, vous avez vu mon message ? — a mixed form that is common, and that old grammars did not foresee).

5.2 The third person and the plural of respect

A very formal register addresses the hearer in the third person, which is the traditional form of service: Monsieur désire ?, Madame est servie., Monsieur a-t-il choisi ? A waiter or a maid may use it. It is frozen into stock phrases of the old shops and hotels, and it is now ironic or stylised when used in conversation. The reverse, the use of the plural to a single person, is the vous. The use of a plural verb with a third-person singular noun of respect (Sa Majesté les a reçus, Son Éminence le cardinal) belongs to the court and church.

5.3 Nous of modesty and on of address

Nous as a plural for one person is the plural of modesty of authors and of speakers in formal contexts: Nous avons montré que … in a paper by one author. Nous is also the inclusive address of nurses and teachers to those in their care: Alors, comment allons-nous aujourd'hui ? — a patronising use. On in the second person has the same function: On a bien dormi ?, On se calme ! (to a child, to a class), where on means "you" and conveys either tenderness or a command. The patronising second-person on and nous are a recognisable register, and both are among the cases where the person of the verb says nothing about the hearer.

5.4 On for je

Nyrop (1899) records that the pronoun on replaces je in the most diverse registers, from the chansons de geste to the court comedy, "par discrétion": the speaker wishes to avoid the first-person pronoun and uses an indefinite pronoun to remove themselves from the scene. His examples include Elmire in Tartuffe: On m'a dit qu'en ce lieu vous me vouliez parler. — Oui. L'on a des secrets à vous y révéler. The use survives in French of today as a way of avoiding the directness of je (On n'a pas l'habitude de …; On vous répondra), and in the substitute for nous (chapter 35).

6. Softening requests: the conditional and the imperfect

The grammar of the request has two mechanisms that lower its force by shifting the time of the request to the hypothetical or the past (chapter 31 gave the ladder).

The conditional of politeness presents the wish as a consequence of an unstated condition: Je voudrais un café ("I would like a coffee [if it were possible]"), Pourriez-vous m'aider ?, Auriez-vous l'heure ?, Je souhaiterais vous parler, Il faudrait que nous parlions. With vouloir the polite form is the conditional; the present je veux is blunt. With pouvoir the conditional adds a degree of indirectness to a question that already has the form of a request. The conditional also appears in the softened assertion (the conditionnel d'atténuation): Je dirais que c'est faux. On pourrait penser que … Il vaudrait mieux … Je préférerais que vous veniez. Ce serait bien. The speaker offers the claim as an opinion, not as a fact.

The imperfect of politeness (imparfait d'atténuation or imparfait de politesse) puts the wish or the question in the past: Je voulais vous demander …, Je venais vous voir pour …, Je me demandais si vous pourriez …, Vous aviez dit que …, C'était pour une réservation. Je cherchais un livre. The effect is that the request is presented as though it had been made earlier, and the present need is treated as already known and settled; the imperfect also marks the speaker as not insisting. A related pattern, the imperfect after si as an indirect request or suggestion: Si vous pouviez me dire … (a request with an unspoken main clause), Si on allait au cinéma ? (a suggestion). The pluperfect and the past conditional are used in the same way for the most delicate formulas: J'aurais voulu vous demander …, J'aurais aimé savoir ….

These forms are not just soft: they signal distance and are chosen for the vous relation; with tu in familiar speech the present is normal (Tu peux me passer le sel ?). The counts of the treebanks (see chapter 31, section 11) show that the first-person conditional is 6.5% of the conditionals in the written web French of GSD and 28% to 43% in the speech and parliamentary treebanks. The imperfect of politeness cannot be counted from the trees, because its form is the ordinary imperfect and its mark is a pragmatic one: a request addressed to the hearer by a first-person verb of wanting or asking in the past (je voulais, je me demandais, je venais) is the cue. The count of je voulais (14 in ParisStories, 7 in Rhapsodie, 1 in Sequoia, 0 in GSD) is mostly the ordinary narrative imperfect (je voulais passer mon bac).

Hedged directives. Other devices: si tu veux (which makes an order into an offer: Viens, si tu veux), quand tu auras un moment, si ça ne te dérange pas, si ça ne vous embête pas, je ne sais pas si …, ça serait bien si …, éventuellement, peut-être, un peu (Pouvez-vous m'aider un peu ?), juste (Je voulais juste savoir …), quand même (Tu pourrais quand même m'aider, a reproach), ne serait-ce que (Ne serait-ce que pour cinq minutes), petit (Un petit café ?; the diminutive softens). Request-initial markers: Excusez-moi,, Pardon,, Dites,, Je suis désolé de vous déranger, mais …, Vous permettez ?, Si je peux me permettre ….

7. Formulas of politeness

The formulas of greeting, farewell, thanks and apology were given in chapter 31; this section adds those of the French politeness system proper.

A French characteristic is the formal ritual of the interaction: Bonjour and Au revoir are exchanged even with strangers in small shops; the question Ça va ? is often a greeting and not a question; and answers to merci are expected (De rien, je vous en prie, avec plaisir). Quebec has its own formulas: Bonjour at leave-taking, Bienvenue for "you're welcome", Merci, bonne journée (see chapter 8).

The treebanks of this manual are poor in these formulas, which is itself a result. In the 558 000 tokens of GSD, ParisStories, Rhapsodie and Sequoia taken together, merci occurs 33 times (23 in GSD, in forums and reviews; 7 in Rhapsodie; 3 in Sequoia; 0 in ParisStories); bonjour 14 times (4, 4, 6, 0); excusez-moi / pardon 8 times; s'il vous plaît once. A politeness classifier cannot be trained on these.

8. Letters and e-mails

The letter has the most conventional frame. A formal French letter has fixed positions:

Two features distinguish the French letter. First, the closing formula repeats the salutation (Madame, Monsieur … Veuillez agréer, Madame, Monsieur …): the title in the salutation is repeated in the closing, in the vocative, as the formula's inserted address. Second, the choice of the formula follows the relation, and the relation between vous and a given formula is fixed: je vous prie d'agréer to a hierarchical superior or an administration, cordialement to a colleague or a client one knows, amicalement to a friend with vous, bises and je t'embrasse with tu. The e-mail has simplified this: the formal ending is replaced in most business mail by Cordialement or Bien cordialement; the salutation can be Bonjour, or Bonjour Madame, or Bonjour Madame Martin, where the printed letter would have Madame,; the subject line (Objet :) and the attachment (pièce jointe, ci-joint) have set expressions. The expressions of closing are Merci d'avance (an informal request closing, which is sometimes judged brusque in formal letters) and Je vous remercie par avance, which is its formal form.

The formulas of Belgium, Switzerland and Québec are close to those of France; we have no open description of their differences.

The only open French e-mail corpus we know in our holdings is the professional corpus of Guenoune et al. (2020, guenoune-2020-dataset-anaphora-analysis-french-emails): 100 anonymised professional e-mail threads, annotated for anaphora, made available for scientific use. It is meant for reference resolution (chapter 35), but the corpus is the place to look for the salutations and closings of real French business e-mail, which no open treebank we hold contains.

In the treebanks, the markers of the letter are almost absent. Cher or chère occurs 30 times in GSD, but mostly as the adjective "dear/expensive" (trop cher). A review begins with Bonjour, in the examples of GSD (fr-ud-test_00212 Bonjour, Nous avons fait l'acquisition d'un O'Hara modèle 2010.; fr-ud-train_02245 Bonjour, Dans ce magasin, il est ressenti une confiance dans les propos du commerçant …), which is the salutation of an e-mail or a forum post imported into a review, not the salutation of a letter.

9. Impoliteness

Impoliteness is the deliberate attack on the hearer's face, and French has a vocabulary of it. The forms:

The words putain and merde are in the treebanks as intensifiers and interjections more than as insults (putain, GSD 2 occurrences, ParisStories 3, Rhapsodie 1, Sequoia 1; con, connard, salaud, idiot, imbécile, crétin together 3, 2, 2 and 0). The distinction between the insulting and the expressive use, and between a friendly insult and a hostile one (Salut, vieux con), is context-bound. The computational literature on French abuse and hate is on tweets and chats: the one open-access dataset that we hold the card of is a French multiparty chat set made to address online hate (Ollagnier et al. 2025, ollagnier-2025-cyberagressionado-large-french-multiparty-chat), which concerns teenagers' cyberaggression, and a multilingual hate-speech detection study that includes French (Chiril et al. 2019, chiril-2019-multilingual-multitarget-hate-speech-detection). The manual does not rely on them.

10. Hedging and boosting

A hedge reduces the speaker's commitment to what they say or the precision of it. A booster increases it. French has both in large numbers.

Counted as strings in the sentence texts (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06; GSD / ParisStories / Rhapsodie / Sequoia, with token totals of 400 385, 42 789, 44 234, 70 545):

Per 10 000 tokens, the speech-versus-writing contrast is clear in the degree and approximator words: un peu is 1.9 in GSD against 23.1 in ParisStories and 14.7 in Rhapsodie; vraiment 1.7, 32.5 and 11.8; en gros 0.02, 4.0 and 1.4; franchement 0.05 and 4.7 in ParisStories; environ is the opposite, 2.6 in GSD against 0 in ParisStories (a written approximator, used with numbers and dates). Probablement and sans doute are written (33 and 16 in GSD, 0 in ParisStories), where the spoken epistemic hedge is peut-être, je crois, je pense. The pair function words of the booster, très and trop show a register difference too: trop as an intensifier (trop bien, trop cool) is a spoken and young feature (56 in ParisStories, 13 per 10 000, against 1.8 in GSD).

The verbs of opinion are the main epistemic hedges in speech. Je pense occurs 10 times in GSD, 34 in ParisStories, 27 in Rhapsodie and 16 in Sequoia; je crois 6, 26, 31 and 12; je trouve 10, 8, 5 and 1; j'ai l'impression 0, 6, 3 and 0; il me semble 1, 7, 5 and 4; je ne sais pas / je sais pas 1, 39, 16 and 0. In the spoken data, then, je pense and je crois together are 60 per 43 000 tokens (14 per 10 000) in ParisStories and 58 per 44 000 (13 per 10 000) in Rhapsodie, against 16 in 400 000 (0.4) in GSD. The pair has been studied in a variationist analysis (Deng 2023, deng-2023-variationist-analysis-two-french-attitude), whose text we cannot read in our extraction; we cite it as a lead only. The parenthetical use (Il est, je pense, parti hier) is parsed in UD as parataxis (see chapter 30), and the main-clause use (Je pense qu'il est parti) as the root with a ccomp; the pragmatic reading is that the first is a hedge on the proposition and the second a report of the speaker's belief. The treebank structure thus follows the syntax, not the function (chapter 36).

Sûrement is notable. In standard French sûrement means "surely, probably", and sûr and certain are boosters; the adverb is used as a hedge ("probably") in conversation. Évidemment and bien sûr are boosters of a particular kind: they present the proposition as shared, and in speech they can express irony or the polite opposite of what they say (Évidemment que non "of course not").

Verbs. The modal verb devoir in the present has two readings: Il doit être là is an inference ("he must be there") and Il doit venir is an obligation or a plan. Pouvoir has the readings of possibility (Il peut pleuvoir), ability and permission. The research on pouvoir is by Colli and colleagues, who classified its senses in transcribed spoken French (Colli et al. 2024, colli-2024-modal-sense-classifier-french-modal: F1 0.94 with a fine-tuned Flaubert model; the most frequent senses in their interview corpus were material possibility and ability) and compared the modal profiles of spoken and written French corpora (Colli & Battistelli 2025, colli-2025-exploration-de-la-modalite-en: the verb pouvoir turns out to be a very frequent marker in all the corpora they compared, and a polysemous one; the epistemic and the alethic categories were the most frequent). The pair of facts is what a hedge detector has to face: the most frequent marker of modality is also ambiguous.

11. Epistemic modality and evidentiality

Epistemic modality is the speaker's estimate of the likelihood of the proposition; evidentiality is the source of the information. French has no grammatical evidentials as such, but several forms do the work.

The conditional of report is the most characteristic. A journalist writes Trois personnes auraient été arrêtées ("three people reportedly have been arrested") and does not take responsibility for the claim. The form is the conditional (present or past), the context is a news report, and the subject is usually in the third person. The same verb form, then, has three unrelated roles in the grammar: a request (je voudrais), a hypothesis (si j'avais le temps, je viendrais) and a hearsay (il y aurait trois morts). On the trees, the third is separated from the second by the absence of a conditional clause with si and by the register of the text (the press), not by a feature. In the written treebanks the conditional is 1.1 per 1 000 tokens in GSD and 2.1 in Sequoia (whose texts include newspaper and Europarl material), and the third-person forms dominate (398 of 431 in GSD, 104 of 146 in Sequoia).

A related hedge is the subjunctive of doubt and the indicative of certainty: after je doute que and il n'est pas certain que the subjunctive is used, but after je pense que in the affirmative the indicative (Je pense qu'il viendra), and after je ne pense pas que the subjunctive (Je ne pense pas qu'il vienne): the mood follows the epistemic stance of the main verb (chapter 24). The cue in the tree is the Mood=Sub on the embedded verb together with the lemma of the matrix. On the counts, the subjunctive is 379 finite verbs in GSD (0.9 per 1 000 tokens), 48 in ParisStories (1.1) and 58 in Rhapsodie (1.3): the rates are equal in speech and writing, so the subjunctive is not a marker of formality.

12. Politeness across varieties and registers

• France: vous is the default with strangers; tu with the young and among colleagues; formal letter formulas.
• Québec: tu is more general than in France, including service encounters and between people who do not know each other; vous remains the form of respect for the elderly and in formal contexts; the closing Bonne journée is routine. The -tu question particle (Tu viens-tu ?) has nothing to do with politeness (chapter 26). A study of Quebec French (Lancien 2020, lancien-2020-variation-stylistique-en-francais-quebecois) shows that speakers adjust their articulation to the identity of the interlocutor: in a game with the speaker's partner the vowels were shorter and nearer the centre of the vowel system than in the same task with an investigator of the same community or of another one. It is a preliminary study, with two couples, and it does not concern address forms. It indicates that style shift on the hearer is present in the sounds as well as in the pronouns.
• Belgium and Switzerland: close to France; s'il vous plaît in Belgium also means "here you are" (chapter 8); in Switzerland the use of tu in the family and the school is wide.
• Africa: vous is used to respect elders and in public; the family titles (tonton, tantie, maman) are used for non-relatives as an address of respect.
• Written French: the register markers are the same as in chapter 37; the formulas of section 8 belong to the written formal register, and the speech of bonjour and merci is almost the same in all registers.

How Mova handles it

In English. Mova has a politeness detector for English as a rule and cue base in the pragmatic layer (see the English chapter 32): the cues are the request strategies, the modals, the hedges, the honorific words, the vocatives. A hedge label and counts of hedges and boosters are part of the parse database. The politeness of the sentence is a feature of the act classifier; the dialogue layer (world/src/talk.rs) handles greetings, thanks and apologies as social obligations.

In French, none of this runs. What is true on 2026-11-06:

• There is no French list of hedges, boosters, address terms, politeness formulas or request strategies in Mova. The French sentence goes through the English tree parser after en xpos-fill; the pronouns tu and vous are read as PRON, and the tree has the vocative relation where the treebank marks it. The grammatical cues that matter for politeness (the polite singular vous, the conditional of politeness, the imperfect of politeness, the choice of est-ce que or inversion) are not tagged: Mood=Cnd does not survive the tag set of the English parser (chapter 13), so a French request in the conditional is a finite verb like any other.
• The UD French treebanks mark Polite=Yes|No|Unknown on vous in the MISC column, on 70 of 649 annotated tokens as Yes (chapter 30). The CoNLL-U reader in en/ carries the MISC column, but nothing in Mova reads Polite.
• The counts of this chapter (tu/vous ratio, the share of first-person conditionals, the speech hedges per 10 000 tokens) are the kind of feature that would give a French register and politeness score of a text with no new lexicon beyond a short list of words: they are computed from the trees and from word counts, like the counts of chapter 37.

What is being built. French pragmatics is being built as a layer for the Eel: on 2026-11-06 the Eel's schedule has a round kind prag-fr, gated on a pinned French dev sample (chapter 30, §9.4; tools/eel/src/schedule.rs, tools/eel/src/native.rs, on the branch under development). Its executable is not yet written, and no politeness or hedge field for French exists. In the planned language-independent meta-pragmatics, the politeness and hedging values would be shared (a softened request, a hedge, a booster, a polite address); what is French is the marking: vous and its singular agreement, the conditional and imperfect of politeness, the formulas of section 7. The binary T/V choice has no counterpart in the English labels, so a shared schema would need an address field that English leaves empty; nothing of this is implemented.

What is needed, in order of cost. (1) The cue counts of this chapter as a per-text feature vector: tu-family against vous, vocative words, first-person Mood=Cnd, the stock request forms, the hedge and booster list of section 10 per 10 000 tokens. (2) A closed list of French address terms, formulas and request strategies (sections 5, 7, 6), written once and checked against the trees. (3) The agreement test of section 2.3: a vous subject with a singular predicate is a polite singular, and its gender is the hearer's. (4) A French letter-and-e-mail frame detector (section 8). (5) An evaluation set: the French politeness resources that exist are small (sections 7–9), and none is an open, graded politeness corpus like the English one used by Mova's detector. A small gold set could be made of French requests with the relation (tu or vous, status) written in; the Rhapsodie interviews, the ParisStories stories and the reviews of GSD give three different relations to start from.

Sources

• Nyrop, K. 1899. Grammaire historique de la langue française, vol. 5 (syntax), on the forms of address (§§192–197) and on on (§§379–380). nyrop-1899-grammaire-historique-de-la (public domain).
• Brunot, F. 1906. Histoire de la langue française, vol. 3 (on Maupas and the seventeenth-century tu and vous). brunot-1906-histoire-de-la-langue (public domain). Brunot, F. 1922. La pensée et la langue. brunot-1922-la-pensee-et-la (public domain).
• Sperlich, D., Leem, J., Ahn, E.-J. 2016. The interaction of politeness systems in Korean learners of French. PACLIC 30. sperlich-2016-interaction-politeness-systems-korean-learners (CC BY 4.0).
• Lancien, M. 2020. Variation stylistique en français québécois : l'effet de l'identité de l'interlocuteur. JEP-TALN-RÉCITAL 2020. lancien-2020-variation-stylistique-en-francais-quebecois (CC BY 4.0).
• Colli, A., Rossini, D., Battistelli, D. 2024. A modal sense classifier for the French modal verb pouvoir. colli-2024-modal-sense-classifier-french-modal (CC BY 4.0). Colli, A., Battistelli, D. 2025. Exploration de la modalité en français parlé et écrit. colli-2025-exploration-de-la-modalite-en (CC BY 4.0).
• Deng, D. 2023. A variationist analysis of two French attitude expressions: je pense and je crois. deng-2023-variationist-analysis-two-french-attitude (CC BY 4.0; the text could not be read in our extraction: cited as a lead only).
• Guenoune, H. et al. 2020. A dataset for anaphora analysis in French emails. guenoune-2020-dataset-anaphora-analysis-french-emails (CC BY 4.0).
• Ollagnier, A. et al. 2025. CyberAgressionAdo-Large. ollagnier-2025-cyberagressionado-large-french-multiparty-chat; Chiril, P. et al. 2019. Multilingual and multitarget hate speech detection in tweets. chiril-2019-multilingual-multitarget-hate-speech-detection (both CC BY 4.0; cited by title and abstract only).
• Brown, P., Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness; Brown, R., Gilman, A. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C., on the politeness of interaction. Cited as background; not held.
• UD French GSD, ParisStories, Rhapsodie (CC BY-SA 4.0), Sequoia, PUD, FQB; counts of 2026-11-06. Sentences quoted by sent_id.

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