31.1983, Review: English; Spanish; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Freytag (2019)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1983. Tue Jun 16 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 31.1983, Review: English; Spanish; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Freytag (2019)
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Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2020 13:27:20
From: Nicolas Ruytenbeek [nicolasruytenbeek at gmail.com]
Subject: Exploring Politeness in Business Emails
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AUTHOR: Vera Freytag
TITLE: Exploring Politeness in Business Emails
SUBTITLE: A Mixed-Methods Analysis
SERIES TITLE: Language at Work
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2019
REVIEWER: Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University
SUMMARY
In this monograph, Vera Freytag (VF) offers a detailed analysis of a corpus of
authentic British English and Peninsular Spanish emails in the workplace,
complemented by insights from a metapragmatic approach. Exploring Politeness
in Business Emails (EPBE) reveals the use of a similar set of realization and
modification strategies in English and Spanish directives, with differences in
relative frequencies emerging between the two languages. The author devotes
special attention to the interpersonal variables bearing on the form of
directive business emails.
Chapter 1, “Directive Speech Events in Business Emails”, introduces the aims
and the goals of EPBE. VF first explains why it is relevant to study
politeness in email business communication, a genre characterized by
participants’ efforts to maintain a balance between their interactional and
transactional goals. The author proposes to fill research gaps concerning
comparative and pragmalinguistic approaches to the realization of directive
speech events in English and Spanish, as well as the social factors affecting
politeness strategies used in business emails. She advocates the prevalence of
directives in daily communication and their inherent face-threat as reasons to
privilege them in this monograph (see also Flöck 2016). Combining insights
from the universality paradigm and the diversity paradigm, VF provides a short
historical overview of politeness theories originating in Brown & Levinson’s
(1987) ground-breaking model, with a focus on the discursive turn and
socio-constructionist approaches. This chapter also introduces social
variables at the macro and micro levels of speech events and the notion of a
community of practice, and it includes a state of the art concerning
directives in institutional written, in particular computer-mediated,
communication.
In Chapter 2, “A Mixed-Method Approach to the Analysis of Speech Events”, VF
provides information about the methodological aspects of her research. She
first explains how she operationalized directive speech events (SEs) in
business emails and why she relied on the recipient’s interpretation to
identify a particular directive SE. Then she presents her data consisting in
300 British English (BE) and 300 Peninsular Spanish (PS) professional emails
exchanged between colleagues in the context of a hotel resort. These emails
were collected about a year after their production, and a few email writers
completed an online questionnaire probing into their perceptions of the
(in)directness and the (im)politeness of these emails as well as their use of
the email medium. VF also addresses the extent to which both data sets are
comparable, as BE and PS emails have similar purposes. She includes an
explanation about the different social variables taken into account for her
corpus analysis, consisting in writer/recipient sex, social distance, power,
degree of imposition, and email purpose. In addition, she presents Blum-Kulka
& Ohlstain’s (1984) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP),
which she uses to analyse the head act strategies and linguistic modification
(downgraders and upgraders) in her directive SEs. The remainder of Chapter 2
outlines how the statistical analyses were carried out and described the
research objectives and hypotheses.
VF reports on the results of her email analyses in Chapter 3, “A
Cross-Cultural Analysis of English and Spanish Email Directives”. These
results for different directive SE components, i.e., head act strategies and
sentence-types, downtoners, upgraders, and sequencing strategies, are
presented in separate subsections. The author discusses the most common
patterns, such as the often downgraded preparatory interrogatives, shedding
light on the relationship between head act realizations and modification
strategies. Her data also reveals a general, somewhat surprising, preference
for positive politeness in both languages. In addition, different roles are
suggested for the so-called politeness marker “please”, which actually serves
two distinct, yet not incompatible, functions: in some situations it increases
message transparency, like upgraders, while in others it compensates for
directness, as downtoners typically do. The results of the questionnaire about
the perception of (in)directness and (im)politeness in head act strategies are
also commented on in this chapter.
In Chapter 4, “The Contextual Complexity of Email Directives”, VF focuses on
the bulk of results pertaining to the influence of social variables on head
act strategies and sentence-types, downgrading and upgrading modification,
sequencing strategies, and how these effects differ according to the language
used. While no effect at all of the sex of the email writer was found, all the
other variables gave rise to significant results (at least in some of the
statistical models). Without giving too much detail, several results are worth
mentioning. For instance, more direct strategies occur in same sex
interactions, and there are noticeable differences in the use of embedded
directives and reference markers with BE and PS recipients. Concerning social
distance, direct strategies are more frequent in high distance situations, but
they are complemented by an important use of downgrading devices, apparently
not incompatible with emphasis on urgency, also common in these situations.
For degree of imposition, preparatory interrogatives are more frequent in high
imposition directives. Likewise, some of the linguistic downgraders, and
upgraders such as intensifiers occur more often in high imposition situations.
Concerning the variable of relative power, the need for mitigation, in
particular the use of a second-person perspective, is more common in downward
power interactions. By contrast, pre-grounders and thanking occur more
frequently in upward power emails. Finally, different email purposes give rise
to different head act strategies, e.g., imperatives are more frequent for
requests for confirmation/reply, and preparatory interrogatives for requesting
a piece of information. More than a half of the emails concerning price
negotiation include a preparatory interrogative, and the object of an email
influences the use of mitigation.
The conclusion, Chapter 5 entitled “The Study of Politeness in Business
Emails: Concluding Remarks”, discusses the main implications of EPBE, and
provides the reader with suggestions for future research on politeness in
business written communication. From a theoretical perspective, EPBE confirms,
on the one hand, the relevance of a distinction between (in)directness and
(im)politeness and, on the other hand, the crucial role of the variables of
distance, power and imposition on the form of email directives. From a
methodological perspective, VF emphasizes the usefulness of the notion of a
community of practice to address the shared linguistic repertoire of workplace
colleagues. A practical implication is the need to stress awareness of
national and cultural stereotypes (most of which are disconfirmed by the
corpus data reported on in EPBE) among language learners and individuals in
the workplace, so as to avoid that they endorse inadequate generalizations
about linguistic behaviour. Furthermore, in view of the numerous contextual
variables involved in email communication, it makes little sense to sketch
general recommendations for appropriate business emails. However, VF provides
a handful of guidelines based on the results of her corpus analysis. In this
final chapter, she also outlines directions for further work on the perception
of (im)politeness in email directives, taking into account different channels
and the second language of the participants. The general preference for
positive politeness in business emails also deserves extra investigation.
EVALUATION
In EPBE, VF convincingly achieves her initial goals. In particular, she
demonstrates the relevance of a cross-cultural analysis of email SEs in
business communication, and she confirms the universalist tendency according
to which BE and PS writers use a similar set of politeness strategies in their
performance of directives. Despite VF’s insistence on the usefulness of
combining an analysis of authentic production data and a perception study, one
may regret that the online questionnaire probing into perceptions of
(in)directness and (im)politeness was only administered to four email writers
(cf. p. 177), thereby limiting the statistical power of the results obtained
and the possible generalization to larger populations. However, I believe a
proper investigation of how directive SEs are perceived by their recipients
actually was beyond the scope of EPBE, which, in itself, is a very valuable
and in-depth contribution to the study of email directives.
Throughout EPBE, VF systematically refers to the results of generalized linear
mixed models, which she provides as Appendices, a useful resource for the
readers who want to know more about the output of the statistical analyses.
This rigorous treatment of the corpus data enables her to signal to the reader
whether or not a particular result is statistically significant at p<.05. VF
also provides many examples for the variety of politeness strategies and
downgraders/upgraders present in the corpus, with English translations
alongside the original Spanish examples.
Quite rightly, VF avoids assuming Blum-Kulka & Ohlstain’s (1984) continuum of
(in)directness, for the reasons that it has not been consistently applied in
the literature and it was based on an outsider’s perspective, not on the
actual recipient’s. She also makes a clear distinction between speech acts,
which are traditionally conceptualized in terms of single utterances, and
speech events or “speech situations”, which consist in multiple utterances
achieving a given perlocutionary goal. In addition, while she endorses most of
the CCSARP’s politeness strategies, she added two new categories, based on the
content of her data. In a similar vein, VF provides interesting descriptions
of the variables of power and social distance and their importance in business
communication, as she explicitly distinguishes between coercive and legitimate
power, and between the degree of familiarity associated with liking vs.
acquaintance, respectively.
VF offers up-to-date discussions of her findings with respect to her
hypotheses about social variables, and she situates them against the
background of previous work reviewed in e.g., Waldvogel (2001). That being
said, two remarks concerning these results are in order.
First, due to the imbalanced composition of the email corpus -- about 70% of
the emails were written in low imposition situations (p. 55-56) -- not all the
observed results for the variable of degree of imposition are significant, as.
The same limitation holds for relative power, the large majority of emails
taking place in equal power situations (91% of the emails for the BE corpus;
62% for the PS corpus, cf. p. 53-54). This limited comparability for some of
the variables of interest is a shortcoming that VF herself acknowledges on
page 36, but it is difficult to tell, in particular in the sections on pages
153-161, which results are and which are not statistically significant.
Second, some of the author’s hypotheses outlined on pages 77-80 lack
sufficient motivation. For example, it is unclear why VF does not expect any
effect of writer sex on the realization of email directive SEs in her corpora.
I agree that available empirical and experimental evidence on this issue is
far from clear-cut, but I would have expected a hypothesis about writer sex in
line with the idea that the communicative style typically associated with
women has a stronger orientation towards politeness and mitigation strategies
(Herring 1994; Lakoff 1975). Moreover, assuming that no effect of writer sex
should occur, I fail to see why this variable was included in VF’s statistical
models as a predictor variable, instead of being treated as a variable to be
controlled for (random variable). In contrast to her quite detailed discussion
of the non-necessarily linear relationship between indirectness and
politeness, I was also surprised by the short size of the paragraph where VF
explains that she did not expect mitigation strategies to go hand in hand with
perceived indirectness in her pilot perception study (p. 80).
Summing up, “Exploring Politeness in Business Emails: A Mixed-Methods
Analysis” is a well-written book that provides valuable insights into the
choice of head act strategies, request modification in business directive
emails and how these are determined by the interpersonal parameters of the
interaction.
REFERENCES
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Elite Olshtain. 1984. Requests and apologies: A cross
cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied
Linguistics 5 (3): 196-213.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Flöck, Ilka. 2016. Requests in American and British English. A contrastive
multi-method analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Herring, Susan C. 1994. Politeness in computer culture: Why women thank and
men flame. In Cultural Performances: Proceedings of the Third Berkeley Women
and Language Conference (pp. 278-294). Berkeley Women and Language Group.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and woman’s place. New York: Harper & Row.
Waldvogel, Joan. 2001. Email and workplace communication: A literature review.
Language in the Workplace Occasional Papers 3.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Nicolas Ruytenbeek is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University. He is
interested in the study of utterance production and interpretation both from a
theoretical and an empirical perspective, and more generally in topics at the
semantics-pragmatics interface. He specializes in experimental approaches to
indirect speech acts and politeness. His current research concerns the
emotional responses to (im)politeness in online discourse.
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