Eve Bernier-Rock obtained her PhD in anglophone studies in November 2024 with Bordeaux Montaigne University, under the supervision of Jean Albrespit. She taught French as a foreign language for 6 years for the University of North Carolina and Wester Carolina University, located in North Carolina in the United States. She is now starting her career as a senior lecturer for the University of Strasburg. Her research is in the field of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and intra and intercultural communication between francophones and anglophones. Eve is interested in the conversational strategies gaps leading to pragmatic failure and the building of bad perceptions in first encounters. Collecting her corpus of data on the field allowed her to conduct a qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis.
In the collective American mind, the French are complainers. We suggest that the stereotype of the French complainer could be partially constructed by a discrepancy in the use of indirect complaints in conversation in each culture. Indeed, “to complain” is a strategy considered both risky and useful in a social context according to previous pragmatic research. Therefore, teaching the strategies to favor and to avoid in each country could help improve intercultural skills and limit the creation of bad perceptions. By collecting authentic conversations during “Speed Friending” events organized in France and in the United-States, we have been able to analyze the use of complaints in each corpus. Although the global quantity of complaining was nearly the same in both corpora, we have observed interesting differences related to the object of the complaints.
