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Article published In:
Applied Pragmatics
Vol. 2:1 (2020) ► pp.54–79

Email requests in an ELF academic setting

“Good luck to you, Doctor Judit…”

| University of Pécs

Email messages have become the prevalent medium in academic communication between students and faculty at Hungarian universities. Over the past decade communication with international students of diverse language and cultural backgrounds has made the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) typical in a previously culturally homogeneous setting. This paper analyzes email requests written by international students of various first language (L1) backgrounds (N = 37). The aim is to characterize requests in terms of directness, strategy use, request modification, address forms and closings. Findings shed light on three salient features of ELF requests: an overall preference for direct strategies, a limited range of internal modifiers, and uses of mostly formal, though not always academic address forms. Given the goal-driven nature of ELF interactions, the paper argues that these characteristics may serve as pragmatic strategies to preempt misunderstanding and to enhance intelligibility. Furthermore, interactants’ wish to express identity and their engagement in constructing new norms specific to their unique ELF contexts may also underlie their pragmalinguistic choices.

Keywords: email communication, interlanguage requests, ELF, intercultural pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Student-faculty email exchanges: An ILP perspective
    • 2.2ELF communication
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants and data
    • 3.2Procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Degree of directness and strategy choice
    • 4.2Request modification
    • 4.3Forms of address and closings
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Directness and request strategy
    • 5.2Request modification
    • 5.3Forms of address and closings
    • 5.4Co-construction of new sociopragmatic norms
  • 6.Conclusions and directions for further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 10 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.18017.dom
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