A growing body of research is exploring the socio-pragmatic features of communication and the negotiation of sociolinguistic politeness among students and between students and faculty in university contexts around the world (e.g., Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007; Bou-Franch, 2013; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2011). Much less is known, however, about sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic practices in authentic workplace communication, especially in power-asymmetrical situations. This is regrettable because pragmatic failure in such contexts may have potentially serious implications.
This presentation reports on a study of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic practices observed in email exchanges between a predominantly L1 Japanese administrative staff and a predominately L1 English faculty in an English-medium graduate university in Japan. A large corpus of authentic email messages between the administrative staff and faculty was created and the emails were coded using the framework from Blum-Kulka et al. (1987). To aid analysis, email messages dealing with near-identical requests were chosen. Interviewees were asked to complete Hill et al.’s (1986) three-part questionnaire. The answers provided a context-specific framework for analysis of perceived politeness. Results suggest that the sociopragmatic strategies and pragmalinguistic resources employed by the staff were extremely limited, with a narrow range of variation. Furthermore, many hybrid elements were identified in the emails, indicating a good deal of pragmatic transfer and negotiation in this authentic job-related context.
These results partially support previous research on L2 users’ pragmatic performance and add a layer of sophistication to the current research on the development of pragmatic competence in a foreign language.
References
Biesenbach-Lucas, S. (2007). Students writing emails to faculty: An examination of e-politeness among native and non-native speakers of English. Language Learning & Technology, 11(2), 59-81.
Bou-French, P. (2011). Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations. Journal of pragmatics, 43, 1772-1785.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2011). ‘‘Please answer me as soon as possible’’: Pragmatic failure in non-nativespeakers’ e-mail requests to faculty. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3193-3215.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different? Journal of Pragmatics, 11, 131-146.
Hill, B., Ise, S., Ikuta, S., Kawasaki, A., & Ogino, T. (1986). Universals of linguistic politeness: Quantitative evidence from Japanese and American English. Journal of Pragmatics, 10, 347-371.
