Exploring Politeness in Business Emails

A Mixed-Methods Analysis

Vera Freytag

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788925952
• eBook ISBN: 9781788925976
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Exploring Politeness in Business Emails explores the contextual complexities of workplace emails by comparing British English and Peninsular Spanish directive speech events and systematically assessing the impact of contextual factors. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis, and the inclusion of metapragmatic insights in the interpretation of the results, the book offers an innovative approach to the study of politeness. The book partially contradicts previous assumptions about English and Spanish directives and provides new insights into the role of politeness in the workplace. By offering a meticulous account of the linguistic choices made by the English and Spanish first language users and the contextual factors influencing these choices, the book suggests far-reaching implications for future research in cross-cultural pragmatics and business discourse, as well as practical implications relevant for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners interested in these fields.

1 Directive Speech Events in Business Emails

In the era of globalization, a growing number of workplaces are bringing together people of different cultural backgrounds who are faced with the challenges of working together and communicating effectively. Such workplaces are ideal for conducting a study on language behavior, as managers and employees engage in a variety of speech events to achieve their goals, either in their first language (L1) or in a different language, depending on to whom they are talking. Irrespective of the particular goal that is being pursued, business practitioners engage in both transactional and interactional talk (Angouri & Marra, 2011; Brown & Yule, 1983), i.e. talk that functions mainly to transfer information, and talk that is used primarily to maintain social relationships. Workplace communication, therefore, also offers a fruitful source for the study of verbal politeness phenomena, as it allows insights into how people formulate their speech events in a way that enhances the chances of success without harming their relationship with others.

Research into institutional discourse originated in the early 1990s with the ground-breaking publications of Talk and Social Structure (Boden & Zimmermann, 1991) and Talk at Work (Drew & Heritage, 1992). Since then, the bulk of studies on institutional discourse has grown exponentially (cf. Section 1.3), but has mainly focused on English-speaking contexts, has been set in the university context due to issues of data accessibility and is mainly limited to spoken discourse. In the last few decades, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has revolutionized workplace communication, yet it has attracted the attention of very few researchers in linguistic pragmatics to date.

The current book aims to fill the research gaps identified in the fields of institutional discourse (more specifically business discourse) and CMC by investigating politeness phenomena in English and Spanish business emails. More specifically, I compare the realizations of directive speech events in emails written by British English (BE) and Peninsular Spanish (PS) L1 users in a workplace located in Spain.1 I chose to investigate directives (i.e. attempts to get the addressee to do something, cf. Searle, 1976) for three reasons: (1) their important role and frequent use in business interaction; (2) the sustainable amount of literature available on directives, serving as a useful standard of comparison; and (3) the lack of systematic studies on English and Spanish directives that are based on spontaneously occurring data in business contexts. The present study also includes various types of directives in the analysis, i.e. requests, commands, advice and suggestions, whereas most of the earlier studies were limited to the investigation of one of the latter types. By considering the situated nature of the directives produced, including external modification and sequencing strategies (cf. Section 2.4), this project is concerned with a systematic analysis of speech events rather than speech acts. In other words, the study goes beyond a mere sentence-based approach to the analysis of directives by taking the email discourse as the unit of analysis.

1.1 Objectives and Outline of the Book

By providing a comparison of English and Spanish business emails, this study aims to add a new dimension to the research field of cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP), in particular, where the research to date reveals three major limitations.

Firstly, most studies in CCP, including those that compare English and Spanish, are based on data elicitation techniques such as role-plays or discourse completion tasks (DCTs; cf. Kasper, 2000). It has been found, however, that these elicitation techniques do not produce data comparable to naturally occurring discourse (cf. Flöck, 2016), suggesting that researchers should focus on authentic language data.

Secondly, apart from the lack of comparative studies that systematically investigate directives in naturally occurring discourse, CCP research has revealed a dearth of studies that systematically account for the effects of both social and discourse contexts on language use. While there is an increasing awareness of the context-sensitivity of language, studies that establish which exact contextual factor leads to the choice of one particular strategy over another are still sorely needed.

Thirdly, time and time again it has been argued that CCP and politeness research should not only focus on language production, but it should also take into account the perception of linguistic strategies. Nevertheless, studies that systematically investigate language perception are still few and far between.

This book aims to address the research gaps identified above in the following four research dimensions:

(1) Pragmalinguistic dimension: How are directives realized in English and Spanish business emails? What kind of patterns with regard to the realization of directives can be established for English and Spanish?

(2) Cross-cultural dimension: Are there differences in the ways L1 users of the BE language variety and L1 users of the PS language variety compose directive speech events in business emails?

(3) Sociopragmatic dimension: To what extent do the socio-contextual factors sex, social distance, ranking of imposition, power and purpose of interaction have an effect on the choice of directive realization strategies in BE and PS business emails?2

(4) Perception dimension: How do BE and PS email writers perceive the directive head act strategies in business emails in terms of directness and politeness?

The present project aims at offering a new perspective and a more holistic picture of directives by investigating them along these four dimensions and finding out what forms directives can take in English and Spanish; what differences exist between the directives found in the two languages; which socio-contextual factors lead to the choice of a particular strategy; and finally, how the strategies are perceived. More specifically, it introduces an innovative study with regard to both the object of the study and the methodology employed.

The languages English and Spanish were selected for this study because not only are they important on a global scale but they also remain under-investigated from a contrastive perspective. While such a contrastive perspective is, of course, not new, the present study addresses the research gap identified in CCP by relying on data from spontaneously occurring discourse in specific sociocultural contexts, as they are concerned with business interaction in a very specific community of practice (cf. Section 1.3). The data further represent instances of CMC, more specifically emails. In other words, the data used for analysis come from a less-researched genre (business interaction) as well as from a channel (CMC) which is exponentially gaining in importance in our industrialized society. There is still a significant lack of empirical studies on actual CMC from a CCP perspective in the pragmatics literature.

With regard to the methodology employed, the present project proposes a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The answers to the first two research questions are thus based on a qualitative categorization and a quantitative comparison of the BE and PS directive speech events. While this first step is a worthwhile endeavor in its own right, as it addresses the lack of systematic studies based on authentic data in CCP, the study of the effects that socio-contextual factors have on linguistic choices adds another dimension to the current state of research. The third research dimension is thus approached qualitatively through an assessment of the contextual variables, and quantitatively by systematically measuring the effects of these variables. The insights gained from these analyses of the production data are complemented by a mainly qualitative small-scale study on the perception of the directive head act strategies identified by the target audience. This last step aims at addressing the gap in CCP research by moving away from a purely production-based paradigm to including the perception of discourse strategies. It is hoped that this mixed-method approach provides illuminating insights for the study of politeness in CCP research, in particular.

In this chapter, I provide an elaborate account of the theoretical framework employed in order to clarify how I have conceptualized directive speech events and why I have employed a mixed-method approach to the analysis of the BE and PS directives in the present project. Since the definition of directives draws on insights from speech act theory (SAT) and traditional and recent theories of verbal politeness, and since the methodological approach is informed by various interrelated theoretical concepts, I first outline the early speech act and politeness theories, which generally aim at finding universal principles of human communication. I then present the criticism that has been put forward against the traditional views on politeness and illustrate how pragmatics researchers have increasingly attached more importance to the social discourse context in their conceptualizations of politeness. As the present project contributes to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics, I outline different, but interrelated, conceptualizations of culture, including the definition of culture in cultural anthropology and CCP (Section 1.2). The theoretical framework ends with an overview of the concepts which have served as the methodological foundation of the present study, viz. the concept of communities of practice (CoP), institutional discourse and CMC, including a concise overview of previous studies that are considered relevant for this book (Section 1.3).

In Chapter 2, I provide a synopsis of the framework employed by presenting the specific mixed-method approach and defining directive speech events as the present study’s unit of analysis (Section 2.1). I further outline the methodological approach of both the production and pilot perception study while providing information about the email corpus and the collection of metapragmatic insights, the workplace and the role of email, as well as the composition and comparability of the email data sets (Section 2.2). I then present the assessment procedure and distribution of the social variables sex, social distance, power and imposition (Section 2.3), followed by an outline of the identification procedure of the directives, the coding scheme underlying the production data analysis and the statistical analysis employed (Section 2.4). The chapter ends with a synopsis (Section 2.5), in which I specify my research questions, which have guided the data analyses, and formulate hypotheses that follow from earlier research findings.

Chapter 3 provides the answers to the first two research domains by presenting the results of a cross-cultural comparison of BE and PS email directives according to the analytical levels, i.e. directive head acts (Section 3.1), modification strategies (Section 3.2) and sequencing strategies (Section 3.3). I further outline the co-occurrence patterns found for the directive head act and modifier strategies (Section 3.4). In addition, a discussion of the results regarding the directive head act strategies (Section 3.1) is supplemented by the findings of the directness and politeness ratings.

In Chapter 4, the answers to the third research dimension, i.e. the effects of the contextual factors on strategy choice, are discussed according to the individual social variables, viz. writer sex and addressee sex (Section 4.1), social distance (Section 4.2), imposition (Section 4.3) and power (Section 4.4). I further address the influence of the purpose of interaction on strategy choice (Section 4.5).

The results regarding the fourth research dimension, obtained through a pilot perception study, are incorporated into Chapters 3–5, where they support the interpretation of the findings and conclusions are made.

In the final chapter of the book, I discuss theoretical, methodological and practical implications (Section 5.1) that follow from the findings and provide some suggestions (Section 5.2) that will hopefully guide future research in the field of CCP and business discourse.

1.2 Speech Acts, Politeness and the Matter of Culture

The more descriptions we acquire about the phenomena of...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Abbreviations
• 1 Directive Speech Events in Business Emails
• 2 A Mixed-Method Approach to the Analysis of Speech Events
• 3 A Cross-Cultural Analysis of English and Spanish Email Directives
• 4 The Contextual Complexity of Email Directives
• 5 The Study of Politeness in Business Emails: Concluding Observations
• Appendix
• References
• Index