Les échanges de voeux au nord Cameroun : stratégies discursives, valeurs sémantiques et ethos

This article examines the pragmatics of the communicative act of well-wishing during the Ramadan fast-breaking celebration in Maroua. The speech act is studied on the strength of four situations observed in families, and its analysis is based on Kerbrat-Orecchioni's politeness model (1992, 1996, 2005). The ethnolectal characteristics show that the votive speech act is strongly affected by factors such as religion, collectivism and social values. The prevalent formulations are both explicit and implicit and are based on a very wide range of morphosyntactic and semantic properties. The study also highlights the semantic content of the speech act of well-wishing, which underlies and predetermines the speakers' linguistic choices. In votive utterances, the collectivist nature of the society plays a predominant role and is actualised linguistically by personal deixis: affective, relational, and inclusive pronouns.