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In:Register and Discourse through the Lens of Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Dolores González-Álvarez and Esperanza Rama-Martínez
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 127] 2026
► pp. 182–208

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Chapter 7
Beyond the transactional

Identifying and analysing expressive speech acts in workplace emails

 | The Open University
Published online: 24 March 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.127.07def
Abstract
This chapter investigates the use of expressive speech acts in two corpora of workplace emails. It expands Ronan’s (2015) categorization scheme for expressives and applies it to over 1,100 authentic examples of expressives extracted from emails in the Enron Corpus. The chapter presents the lexical and phraseological properties of these utterances, together with a qualitative analysis of both this data and further data from the Clinton Email Corpus. There is a particular focus on utterances representing emotions such as joy, sorrow, agreement, and disagreement, which are found to interact closely with the degree of closeness between the interlocutors. The corpus data supports the need for a fine-grained categorization scheme for expressives, and for the importance of interactional communication in the workplace.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work
    • 2.1Expressives in corpus linguistics
    • 2.2Expressives in workplace emails
  • 3.Data and annotation
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Data extraction: Identifying expressives
    • 3.3Challenges in defining expressives
  • 4.Formal and functional properties of workplace expressives
    • 4.1Forms and frequencies
    • 4.2Functional categorization
      • 4.2.1Existing annotation schemes
      • 4.2.2An annotation scheme for workplace email expressives
      • 4.2.3Surface expressives
    • 4.3Overall findings
  • 5.Positive and negative emotions
    • 5.1Agreement and Disagreement
    • 5.2Joy and Sorrow
  • 6.Conclusions: The role of emotions in workplace emails
  • 7.Limitations and future outlook
  • Notes
  • References
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