L’imparfait de politesse en roumain : une approche pragmatique
The imperfect politeness in Romanian: a pragmatic approach

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the use of the imperfect tense (fr. « imparfait ») in utterances that require mitigation (Fraser, 1980) in contemporary spoken Romanian. In the first section of the article, we try to establish systematic contexts of the use of Romanian imperfect tense within discourse. To achieve this, natural conversations have been used. Then, we try to investigate the use of the imperfect tense with respect to Brown and Levinson (1978) theory of politeness. Our study reveals that the imperfect can be used as a strategy to address both positive and negative politeness in contemporary spoken Romanian. At last, we try to analyse the links between time deixis and the expression of verbal politeness through the use of the imerfect in Romanian. The use of the imperfect instead of the present tense in Romanian is a proof of the close connection that exist between the notions of deixis and verbal politeness.

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