In:Politeness in Professional Contexts
Edited by Dawn Archer, Karen Grainger and Piotr Jagodziński
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 311] 2020
► pp. 199–224
Chapter 9“I always use the word please”
The production and perception of English and Spanish workplace emails
Published online: 21 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.311.09fre
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.311.09fre
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Motivation and objectives of study
- 1.2Previous findings on English and Spanish directives
- 2.Methodology
- 2.1The email corpus
- 2.2The community of practice
- 2.3The analysis of directive speech events
- 2.4Collection of perception data
- 3.Results
- 3.1Pragmalinguistic dimension
- 3.2Cross-cultural dimension
- 3.3Sociopragmatic dimension
- 3.4Perception dimension
- 4.Conclusion
Notes References Appendix
References (64)
Austin, John L.. 1975. How
to Do Things with Words (2nd
ed). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca, and Sandra Harris. 1996. “Requests
and Status in Business
Correspondence.” Journal of
Pragmatics 28: 635–662.
Bates, Douglas. 2019. “Package
‘lme4’.” [URL]
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Julien House, and Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Cross-Cultural
Pragmatics: Requests and
Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness.
Some Universals in Language
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cameron, Deborah. 2007. “Redefining
Rudeness.” In Rude
Britannia, ed.
by Mani Gorji, 127–138. London: Routledge.
Cheshire, Jenny. 2002. “Sex
and Gender in Variationist
Research.” In The
Handbook of Language Variation and
Change, ed.
by John Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, 423–443. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Díaz Pérez, Francisco J. 2005. “Cortesía
Verbal Y Nivel de Oblicuidad En La Producción de Peticiones
Por Hablantes de Inglés Y de
Español.” Revista Canaria de
Estudios
Ingleses 50: 279–299.
Duthler, Kirk W.. 2006. “The
Politeness of Requests Made via Email and Voicemail: Support
for the Hyperpersonal
Model.” Journal of
Computer-Mediated
Communication 11: 500–521.
Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1992. “Think
Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as
Community-Based
Practice.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 21: 461–490.
Edmondson, Willis, and Juliane House. 1981. Let’s
Talk and Talk about It: A Pedagogic International Grammar of
English. München: Urban and Schwarzenberg.
Field, Andy, Jeremy Miles, and Zoe Field. 2012. Discovering
Statistics Using
R. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi/Singapore: Sage Publications.
Flöck, Ilka. 2016. Requests
in American and British English: A Contrastive Multi-Method
Analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Freytag, Vera. 2019. Exploring
Politeness in Business Emails: A Mixed-Method
Analysis. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Grainger, Karen. 2013. “Of
Babies and Bath Water: Is There Any Place for Austin and
Grice in Interpersonal
Pragmatics?” Interpersonal
Pragmatics 58 (11): 27–38.
Grice, Herbert P.. 1975. “Logic
and
Conversation.” In Speech
Acts, ed.
by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
Ho, Victor. 2010. “Constructing
Identities through Request E-Mail
Discourse.” Journal of
Pragmatics 42: 2253–2261.
Hössjer, Amelie. 2013. “Small
Talk, Politeness, and Email Communication in the
Workplace.” In Pragmatics
of Computer-Mediated
Communication, ed.
by Susan Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tanja Virtanen, 613–638. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton.
Hofmann, Peter. 2003. Language
Politeness: Directive Speech Acts in Brazilian Portuguese,
Costa Rican Spanish and Canadian
English. Stony Brook: State University of New York.
Holmes, Janet. 1983. “The
Structure of Teachers’
Directives.” In Language
and Communication, ed.
by Jack Richards, and Richard Schmidt, 89–115. London: Longman.
. 1998. “Women’s
Role in Language Change: A Place for
Quantification.” In Gender
and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women
and Language Conference, 1996, ed.
by Natasha Warner et al., 313–330. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group.
Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine. 2012. “Politeness
and Impoliteness in Ethnic Varieties of New Zealand
English.” Journal of
Pragmatics 44: 1063–1076.
Holmes, Janet, and Miriam Meyerhoff. 1999. “The
Community of Practice: Theories and Methodologies in
Language and Gender
Research.” Language in
Society 28: 173–183.
Hymes, Dell. 1972. “Models
of the Interaction of Language and Social
Life.” In Directions
in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of
Communication, ed.
by John Gumperz, and Dell Hymes, 35–71. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Jensen, Astrid. 2009. “Discourse
Strategies in Professional E-Mail Negotiation: A Case
Study.” English for Specific
Purposes 28: 4–18.
Jones, Kimberley. 1992. “A
Question of Context: Directive Use at a Morris Team
Meeting.” Language in
Society 21 (3): 427–445.
Kerswill, Paul. 1994. Dialects
Converging: Rural Speech in Urban
Norway. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kasper, Gabriele. 2000. “Data
Collection in Pragmatics
Research.” In Culturally
Speaking: Managing Rapport Through Talk Across
Cultures, ed.
by Helen Spencer-Oatey, 316–341. London/New York: Continuum.
King, Jeremy. 2011. “Power
and Indirectness in Business Correspondence- Petitions in
Colonial Louisiana
Spanish.” Journal of
Politeness
Research 7: 259–283.
Lane, Pia. 2014. “Nexus
analysis.” In Handbook
of
Pragmatics 18, ed.
by Jan-Ola Östmann, and Jef Verschueren. 1–18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated
Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1989. “Social
Network Integration and Language Change in Progress in a
Rural Alpine
Village.” Language in
Society 18: 213–234.
Locher, Miriam, and Richard J. Watts. 2005. “Politeness
Theory and Relational
Work.” Journal of Politeness
Research 1: 9–33.
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, and Patricia Bou Franch. 2013. “A
Cross-Cultural Investigation of Email Communication in
Peninsular Spanish and British English – The Role of
(In)formality and
(In)directness.” Pragmatics
and
Society 4 (1): 1–25.
Manning, Christopher. 2007. “Generalized
Linear Mixed Models (Illustrated with R on Bresnan et Al.’s
Datives
Data).” November 23. [URL]
Márquez Reiter, Rosina. 1997. “Politeness
Phenomena in British English and Uruguayan Spanish: The Case
of Requests.” A Journal of
English and American
Studies 18: 159–167.
. 2000. Linguistic
Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of
Requests and
Apologies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
. 2002. “A
Contrastive Study of Indirectness in Spanish: Evidence from
Peninsular and Uruguayan
Spanish.” Pragmatics 12: 135–151.
Merrison, Andrew J., Jack J. Wilson, Bethan L. Davies, and Michael Haugh. 2012. “Getting
Stuff Done: Comparing E-Mail Requests Form Students in
Higher Education in Britain and
Australia.” Journal of
Pragmatics 44: 1077–1098.
Mills, Sara. 2002. “Rethinking
Politeness, Impoliteness and Gender
Identity.” In Gender
Identity and Discourse Analysis, ed.
by Lia Litosseliti, and Jane Sunderland. 69–89. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pilegaard, Morten. 1997. “Politeness
in Written Business Discourse: A Textlinguistic Perspective
on Requests.” Journal of
Pragmatics 28: 223–244.
Preston, Dennis R.. 1989. Perceptual
Dialectology: Nonlinguists’ Views of Areal
Linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris Publication.
Rogers, Priscilla, and Song Mei Lee-Wong. 2003. “Reconceptualizing
Politeness to Accommodate Dynamic Tensions in
Subordinate-to-Superior
Reporting.” Journal of
Business and Technical
Communication 17: 379–412.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A
simplest systematics for the organization of
turn-taking for
conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735.
Saito, Junko. 2011. “Managing
confrontational situations: Japanese male superiors’
interactional styles in directive discourse in the
workplace.” Journal of
Pragmatics 43: 1689–1706.
Schneider, Klaus. 2012. “Appropriate
Behaviour across Varieties of
English.” Journal of
Pragmatics 44 (9): 1022–1037.
Scollon, Ronald. 2001. Mediated
discourse analysis: The nexus of
practice. London/New York: Routledge.
Scollon, Ronald, and Suzanne Scollon. 2005. Intercultural
Communication: A Discourse
Approach. 2nd
ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Searle, John. 1969. Speech
Acts: An Essay into the Philosophy of
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2000. Culturally
Speaking: Managing Rapport Through Talk Across
Cultures. London/New York: Continuum.
Terkourafi, Maria. 2008. “Toward
a Unified Theory of Politeness, Impoliteness and
Rudeness.” In Impoliteness
in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory
and Practice, ed.
by Derek Bousfield, and Miriam Locher, 45–74. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.
Vine, Bernadette. 2004. Getting
Things Done at Work: The Discourse of Power in Workplace
Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
. 2009. Directives at work: Exploring the contextual complexity of workplace requests. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (7): 1395–1405.
Waldvogel, Joan. 2005. “The
Role, Status and Style of Workplace Email: A Study of Two
New Zealand
Workplaces.” Unpublished
Ph.D.
Dissertation, Wellington, NZ: Victoria University.
Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities
of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and
Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Orthaber, Sara
Orthaber, Sara
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
