الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract This study investigates the communication between professionals at work through the use of written English emails in various Egyptian workplace settings. The study aims at discovering the pragma-stylistic features of workplace emails such as politeness, and how Egyptian professionals formulate their requests among others. The research also aims to determine the directness level of the requests, investigate the use of internal and external modifications in the corpus, as well as determine whether these modifiers are used to mitigate or aggravate the imposition force of a request. The data consists of 358 real, authentic e-mails from Egyptian personnel. To achieve the objective of the study, the politeness strategies were first identified based on (Brown and Levinson, 1978) politeness theory. Next, the (CCSARP) framework 1989 which is based on Blum-Kulka et al, and then modified by (Economidou-Kogetsidis, in 2011) was used to determine the level of directness of requests as well as the internal and external modifications used. The study found that Egyptian employees tend to use ’positive politeness’ when analyzing the politeness strategies in the e-mails. They also mostly tend to use ’Direct’ and Imperative/Mood Derivable’ requests in their e-mails. More specifically, the use of ’Query Preparatory’ and ’Hints’ were also prevalent. However, the analysis of the directness level indicates that Egyptians tend to use ’Most Direct’ request sub-strategies. ’Politeness Marker ’please’, ’Consultative devices’ and ’Downtoners’ were the most used internal modifications. In this case, if an employee uses internal modifications (i.e. ’Consultative devices’ and the ’Politeness Marker’ ’please’) in their e-mails they would be considered polite. Employees also tend to employ ’salutation’, ’closing’ and ’pre-closing/thanks’ external modifications to a great extent which were in line with their receiver’s perception of politeness. |