Abstract This article addresses the relationship between linguistic politeness and addressee status in the performance of written requests in French. According to a first view, conventionalized Can you followed by a verbal phrase (in short, Can you VP?) “indirect requests” (IRs) are preferred because they enable speakers to convey politeness effects absent in imperatives. According to an alternative view, Can you VP? is the standard polite request form in written communication because it avoids impoliteness implications. To test these two competing hypotheses, I carried out a production task experiment with 122 native speakers of Belgian French writing email requests. In this experiment, addressee status was manipulated. An important finding is that higher addressee status does not increase the frequency of Can you VP? requests. Instead of using Can you VP? more often when they address higher status people, the participants used specific politeness markers such as formal greetings and the V-form of address. These results disconfirm the hypothesis that Can you VP? is used to convey extra politeness effects and suggests instead that people use such IRs to avoid the risk of being considered impolite.

中文翻译：

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间接请求是否传达礼貌？法国电子邮件通信中常规化间接请求的实验研究

摘要本文讨论了法语中的书面请求中语言礼貌与收件人状态之间的关系。根据第一种观点，惯用的“您可以在其后跟一个口头短语”（简称“您可以吗？”）是首选的“间接请求”（IR），因为它们可以使说话人传达命令中缺少的礼貌效果。根据另一种观点，您可以VP吗？是书面交流中的标准礼貌要求形式，因为它避免了不礼貌的含义。为了检验这两个相互竞争的假设，我对122名比利时法语的母语人士进行了生产任务实验，他们编写电子邮件请求。在此实验中，操纵了收件人状态。一个重要的发现是，更高的收件人身份不会增加您VP的频率吗？要求。而不是可以使用VP吗？当他们向地位更高的人讲话时，参与者经常使用特定的礼貌标记，例如正式的问候语和地址的V形。这些结果证实了您可以VP的假设。用于表达额外的礼貌效果，并建议人们使用此类IR以避免被视为不礼貌的风险。