Exploring Politeness In Business Emails

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.

This book provides a cutting-edge introduction to cross-cultural pragmatics, a field encompassing the study of language use across linguacultures. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics is relevant for a variety of fields, such as pragmatics, applied linguistics, language learning and teaching, translation, intercultural communication and sociolinguistics. Written by two leading scholars in the field, this book offers an accessible overview of cross-cultural pragmatics, by providing insights into the theory and practice of systematically comparing language use in different cultural contexts. The authors provide a ground-breaking, language-anchored, strictly empirical and replicable framework applicable for the study of different datatypes and situations. The framework is illustrated with case studies drawn from a variety of linguacultures, such as English, Chinese, Japanese and German. In these case studies, the reader is provided with contrastive analyses of language use in important contexts such as globalised business, politics and classrooms. This book is essential reading for both academics and students.

Explores the fascinating phenomenon of indirect speech acts, highlighting the situations they are used in, and how they are understood.

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. Also available as Online Resource: https://benjamins.com/online/hop

Sociolinguistics is the study of the interaction between language and society. In this classic introductory work, Janet Holmes and Nick Wilson examine the role of language in a variety of social contexts, considering both how language works and how it can be used to signal and interpret various aspects of social identity. Divided into three parts, this book explains basic sociolinguistic concepts in the light of classic approaches, as well as introducing more recent research. This sixth edition has been revised and updated throughout, using key concepts and examples to guide the reader through this fascinating area, including: • New material on gender, social media and online use of language, codeswitching, and language policy • An updated companion website that is fully cross- referenced within this book and features video and audio materials and links to useful websites • Revised examples and exercises that include new material from Asia and South America • Fully updated further reading and references sections An Introduction to Sociolinguistics is an essential introductory text for all students of sociolinguistics and a splendid point of reference for students of English language studies, linguistics, and applied linguistics.

Much like in everyday life, politeness is key to the smooth running of relationships and interactions. Professional contexts, however, tend to be characterised by a plethora of behaviours that may be specific to that context. They include ‘polite’ behaviours, ‘impolite’ behaviours and behaviours that arguably fall somewhere between – or outside – such concepts. The twelve chapters making up this edited collection explore these behaviours in a range of communication contexts representative of business, medical, legal and security settings. Between them, the contributions will help readers to theorize about – and in some cases operationalize (im)politeness and related behaviours for – these real-world settings. The authors take a broad, yet theoretically underpinned, definition of politeness and use it to help explain, analyse and inform professional interactions. They demonstrate the importance of understanding how interactions are negotiated and managed in professional settings. The edited collection has something to offer, therefore, to academics, professionals and practitioners alike.

Corpus linguistic methods provide new avenues for (im)politeness scholarship to reflexively evaluate its understanding of communication and language use on the theoretical contributions of corpus linguistics to the linguistic sciences. In this sense, this volume is a unique contribution to (im)politeness scholarship. It showcases studies in the field which employ specialized and general corpora, with methodologies that range from the speech act to the discourse-analytic and conversation-analytic traditions. The book brings into closer contact scholarship that has hitherto remained in relatively different streams of the scientific investigation of (im)politeness. A unifying theme of the chapters here is that (im)politeness phenomena are situated within the institutional and genre-specific expectations of participants in an interaction. Each of the chapters identifies the situatedness of (im)politeness from varying perspectives. The chapters in the volume are sequenced from specialized to general corpora, and simultaneously move from conversation – and discourse – analytic perspectives to contributions that address issues surrounding the identification and extraction of (im)politeness in general corpora. In collating the chapters of the volume, care was taken to focus attention on languages that have been studied extensively in (im)politeness scholarship (varieties of English – British English and Englishes in Hong Kong – and Greek), and languages that are only recently gaining more visibility in the field (Slovenian and Turkish).

This handbook comprehensively examines social interaction by providing a critical overview of the field of linguistic politeness and impoliteness. Authored by over forty leading scholars, it offers a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to a vast array of themes that are vital to the study of interpersonal communication. The chapters explore the use of (im)politeness in specific contexts as well as wider developments, and variations across cultures and contexts in understandings of key concepts (such as power, emotion, identity and ideology). Within each chapter, the authors select a topic and offer a critical commentary on the key linguistic concepts associated with it, supporting their assertions with case studies that enable the reader to consider the practicalities of (im)politeness studies. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of linguistics, particularly those concerned with pragmatics, sociolinguistics and interpersonal communication. Its multidisciplinary nature means that it is also relevant to researchers across the social sciences and humanities, particularly those working in sociology, psychology and history.