A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English – The role of (in)formality and (in)directness. (original) (raw)
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Orality and literacy, formality and informality in email communication
Ibérica: Revista de la …, 2008
"Approaches to the linguistic characteristics of computer-mediated communication (CMC) have highlighted the frequent oral traits involved in electronic mail along with features of written language. But email is today a new communication exchange medium in social, professional and academic settings, frequently used as a substitute for the traditional formal letter. The oral characterizations and linguistic formality involved in this use of emails are still in need of research. This article explores the formal and informal features in emails based on a corpus of messages exchanged by academic institutions and studies the similarities and differences on the basis of their mode of communication (one-to-one or one-to-many) and the sender's mother tongue (native or non-native). The language samples collected were systematically analyzed for formality of greetings and farewells, use of contractions, politeness indicators and non-standard linguistic features. The findings provide new insights into traits of orality and formality in email communication and demonstrate the emergence of a new style in writing for even the most important, confidential and formal purposes which seems to be creating to form a new sub-genre of letter-writing. Keywords: CMC, asynchronous communication, formality, informality, email style"
Ibérica, 2005
This paper presents the results of a corpus-based study which investigates the genre of academic email and more specifically its pragmatic dimension. Four conversational routines (thank yous, apologies, requests, offers) are analysed and compared in two channels: academic e-mails and conventional print letters. In addition, data from both native and non-native speakers of English is considered, which sheds light on some of the differences found in the academic e-mail writing of learners of English. The findings indicate that academic e-mail is a relatively formal type of correspondence which is still largely influenced, as is to be expected, by the genre of the academic letter, and that as a genre, academic e-mail is in the process of formation or semi-formation. Finally, native speakers of English are found to be more informal than non-native speakers of English in academic e-mails.
Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations
Bou Franch, Patricia (2011) “Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1772-1785. , 2011
Despite the increasing interest scholarly research has shown in the study of computer-mediated communication, there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of assumed homogeneity of language usage over the net and focus on the social diversity and variation that characterizes any communication. With this in mind, the present paper is an investigation into the stylistic choices that a particular group of email users made when engaged in a specific activity type. More specifically, it explores the variation in the discourse practices employed to open and close emails in conversation alongside the institutional power of participants and the interactional position of each email contributing to the conversation. To carry out this study a corpus of short email conversations in Peninsular Spanish was collected (n = 240). The analysis focused on the opening and closing sequences of the emails that made up the conversations and considered opening and closing linguistic conventions as discursive practices that members of a community may use strategically. The findings revealed that the discursive practices under scrutiny were subject not only to technological but also to social and interactional constraints and thus highlighted contextual variability. Further, the high degree of sociability in the electronic episodes studied was interpreted as reflecting a “people first, business second” communicative style.
Address forms and politeness markers in Spanish students' emails to faculty
Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada
In the present era of global online communication, email exchanges are one the most common means of interaction between students and professors (Tseng, 2015). However, emails may convey an impolite tone if students do not take status or power imbalance into account to show politeness (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2011). The present study explored the informal second person pronoun of address (tú) and the formal one (usted) in first and follow-up requestive emails sent by Spanish students. In addition, some structural elements to show politeness in the emails were also examined. Although students had time to edit and correct their emails, our results indicate that in half of first-contact emails tú is employed, a percentage that increases in the follow-up email, therefore ignoring the degree of politeness expected in student-professor email communication. On the other hand, verbal and structural markers of politeness were broadly employed to indicate deference, especially in the first email.
Formality and informality in electronic communication
2006
Abstract Electronic mails have nowadays become the most usual support to exchange information in professional and academic environments. A lot of research on this topic to date has focused on the linguistic characteristics of electronic communication and on the formal and informal features and the orality involved in this form of communication. Most of the studies have referred to group-based asynchronous communication.
The pragmatics of letter-writing
World Englishes, 2001
This paper focuses on personal letter-writing as a mode of communication between an L2 writer and an L1 reader, a little explored discourse type, yet particularly vital and salient in the process of language teaching and learning. The corpus is composed of 120 personal letters. They are supposed to be written to British English native speakers. The data were analyzed and discussed in the light of the theoretical insights of a number of modern linguists, notably Grice's Cooperative Principle and Leech's Principle of Politeness as well as Brown and Levinson's views of politeness strategies. The main objective of the study is to examine the corpus of letters in terms of the sociocultural background of the writers, that is, to establish interpretive links between the type of material collected and its situational and cultural context. As a non-nativized variety of English, the language used by the students exhibits certain peculiarities likely to be the result of contradiction between two different cultures. The major argument therefore developed in this study is that these peculiarities can be seen as``errors'' which are the by-product of incomplete understanding of the sociocultural background of the target language.
This study investigated the rhetorical, typographical and paralinguistic features used in workplace emails. It revealed that the email exchanges included both spoken and written language features. The use of these features depended on two main factors that are the degree of involvement between the communicators, on the one hand, and the frequency of exchanging emails regarding a single issue on the other. This study also revealed that the communicative purpose of the email has prompted the type of features used in the emails. The emails that included tasks which were previously carried out using oral methods of communication in the workplace (i.e., face-to-face conversations, telephone calls) included several oral communication practices and typographical errors, whereas the emails that included tasks which were traditionally carried out using written method of communication in the workplace (i.e., letters, memorandums, faxes) mainly included written language features and were written appropriately
Central Asian Journal of Education, 2021
This exploratory study discusses findings pertaining to university students" pragmatic and intercultural communicative competence in the context of Uzbekistan. It begins with a brief review of the research literature related to pragmatics, and its corollary pragmatic success, initially reviewing studies conducted in various contexts in the past several decades. This is followed by a brief overview of university teaching context in Uzbekistan, a methodology for data collection and criteria for participants" selection. The article concludes with a brief discussion of findings and recommendations for further research. In particular, it highlights the necessity for incorporating explicit instruction of formal email writing in a target language at the tertiary level.
2008
Although the idea of the hegemony of English as such on the internet is gradually being eroded, at least by statistics1 and in the linguistics literature (cf. Nunberg 1999; Graddol 1997, 2006; Wallraff 2000, Crystal 2004, and more recently Lovink in press), if not in the popular imagination, reference to the far more subtle influence of the underlying ideology inherent in the adoption of a ‘foreign’ rhetorical system (that enshrined in netiquette and/or English) by users of another language when engaged in computer mediated communication (CMC), has received as yet very little attention. The general question of differences in discourse styles or rhetorical patterning in different languages/cultures and in non-native and nativized varieties of English are