Cover not available
Part of
The Discourse of Indirectness: Cues, voices and functions
Edited by Zohar Livnat, Pnina Shukrun-Nagar and Galia Hirsch
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 316] 2020
► pp. 143–166

Indirectness and effectiveness of requests in professional emails

A case study

| Tech-CICO (Université de Technologie de Troyes) , France
| Tech-CICO (Université de Technologie de Troyes) , France
This chapter deals with the question: which strategies are used when formulating a request in a particular context – workplace – and with a specific means of communication (electronic mails). This research is based on a case study: the analysis of 60 emails sent over two days by three employees of a large French professional training company. Our research questions are: how are requests formulated in organizational context? What relationship can we observe between indirectness and effectiveness of email requests.
Keywords: request, electronic mail, workplace, discourse effectiveness, politeness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Making a request by electronic mail
    • 2.1The act of request
    • 2.2A request by email
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Theoretical and methodological frames
    • 3.2.Corpus
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Request / Non request
    • 4.2Direct or indirect request?
    • 4.3Polite or brutal request? Managing the illocutionary force of a request
    • 4.4How to be effective and polite?
    • 4.5Request, activity and hierarchical position
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 29 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.316.07ati
References (55)
References
Atifi, Hassan, Nadia Gauducheau, and Michel Marcoccia. 2012. “The Effectiveness of Professional Emails: Representations and Communicative Practices.” In Representations in Dialogue – Dialogue in Representations. Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis, n Dialogue Analysis “Dialogue and Representation.” Montréal, Québec, Canada, April, 26–3, 2011, ed. by Alain Létourneau, and François Cooren, 67–82. Montréal: IADA.Google Scholar
. 2017. “Je devine que tu dois être surbookée: anticiper la multi-activité de ses interlocuteurs dans les courriels professionnels.” In Quand travailler, c’est s’organiser. La multi-activité à l’ère numérique., ed. by Alexandra Bidet, Caroline Datchary, and Gérald Gaglio, 169–183. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole des Mines. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Atifi, Hassan, Sacha Mandelcwajg, and Michel Marcoccia. 2011. “The Co-operative Principle and Computer-Mediated Communication: the Maxim of Quantity in Newsgroup Discussions.” Language Sciences 33 (2): 330–340. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biesenbach-Lucas, Sigrun. 2006. “Making Requests in Email: Do Cyber-Consultations Entail Directness? Toward Conventions in a New Medium.” Pragmatics and Language Learning 11: 81–107.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Soshana. 1987. “Indirectness and Politeness in Requests: Same or Different.” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (2): 131–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Soshana, and Elite Olshtain. 1984. “Requests and Apologies: A Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP).” Applied Linguistics 5 (3): 196–213. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Soshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood: NJ, Alblex.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carvalho, Vitor R., and William W. Cohen. 2005. “On the Collective Classification of Email Speech Acts.” In Proceedings of the 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval , 345–352. New York: ACM.
Chen, Yuan Shan. 2015. “Developing Chinese EFL learners’ Email Literacy through Requests to Faculty.” Journal of Pragmatics 75: 131–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cho, Thomas. 2010. “Linguistic Features of Electronic Mail in the Workplace: A Comparison with Memoranda.” Language@Internet 7, 3. [URL] (April, 2020).Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H., and Dale H. Schunk. 1980. “Polite Responses to Polite Requests.” Cognition 8: 111–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Felice, Rachele, Jeannique Darby, Anthony Fisher, and David Peplow. 2013. “A Classification Scheme for Annotating Speech Acts in a Business Email Corpus.” ICAME Journal 37: 71–105.Google Scholar
Derks, Daantje, Agneta H. Fischer, and Arjan E.R. Bos. 2008. “The Role of Emotion in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Review.” Computers in Human Behavior 24(3): 766–785. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dürscheid, Christa, and Carmen Frehner. 2013. “Email Communication.” In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, ed. by Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen, 35–54. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duthler, Kirk W. 2006. “The Politeness of Requests Made via Email and Voicemail: Support for the Hyperpersonal Model.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (2): 500–521. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gains, Jonathan. 1999. “Electronic Mail – A New Style of Communication or Just a New Medium?: An Investigation into the Text Features of Email.” English for Specific Purposes 18 (1): 81–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gauducheau, Nadia. 2012. “L’expérience du courriel en situation professionnelle: représentations de l’activité, jugements et affects.” Activités 9 (2): 88–111.Google Scholar
Gauducheau, Nadia, and Michel Marcoccia. 2011. “Le soutien social dans les forums de discussion Internet: réalisations interactionnelles et contrat de communication.” In Psychologie sociale, communication et langage. De la conception aux applications, ed. by Philippe Castel, Edith Salès-Wuillemin, and Marie-Françoise Lacassagne, 349–368. Bruxelles: De Boeck Editions.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Harrison, Sandra, and Diane Allton. 2013. “Apologies in Email Discussions.” In Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, ed. by Susan C. Herring, Dieter Stein, and Tuija Virtanen, 315–338. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hassel, Lewis, and Margaret Christensen. 1996. “Indirect Speech Acts and their Use in Three Channels of Communication .” In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Communication Modeling, ed. by Frank Dignum, Jan Dietz, and Egon Verharen, 1–14. Tilburg, The Netherlands: Springer Verlag.Google Scholar
Herring, Susan C. 2001. “Computer-Mediated Discourse.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, 612–634. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Herring, S. C. 2004. “Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis: An Approach to Researching Online Communities.” In Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, ed. by Sasha Barab, Rob Kling, and James H. Gray, 338–376. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ho, V. Chung Kwong. 2011. “A discourse-Based Study of Three Communities of Practice: How Members Maintain a Harmonious Relationship while Threatening each other’s Face via Email.” Discourse Studies 13 (3): 299–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 2006. Gendered Talk at Work. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hutchby, Ian (2001). Conversation and Technology. From the telephone to the internet. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Iedema, Rick. 2003. Discourses of Post-Bureaucratic Organization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 1997. “Le traitement des actes de langage en analyse des conversations: l’exemple du remerciement.” In Dialogue Analysis: Units, Relations and Strategies beyond the Sentence. Contributions in Honour of Sorin Stati’s 65th Birthday, ed. by E. Weigand, 129–143. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. 2001. Les actes de langage dans le discours: théorie et fonctionnement. Paris: Nathan.Google Scholar
Kruger, Justin, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker, and Ng Zhi-Wen. 2005. “Egocentrism over E-mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89: 925–936. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, Robin T. 2009. “Conversational Logic.” In Key Notions for Pragmatics, ed. by Jef Verschueren, and Jan-Ola Östman, 102–113. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lampert, Andrew, Robert Dale, and Cecile Paris. 2010. “Detecting Emails Containing Requests for Action.” In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLTNAACL) , 984–992.
Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Leopold, Lisa. 2015. “Request Strategies in Professional E-mail Correspondence: Insights from the United States Workplace.” TESL Canada Journal 32 (5): 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewkowicz, Myriam, and Julien Laflaquière. 2017. “Les messages électroniques face à la multi-activité: des pistes de reconception.” In Quand travailler, c’est s’organiser. La multi-activité à l’ère numérique., ed. by Alexandra Bidet, Caroline Datchary, and Gérald Gaglio, 153–167. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole des Mines. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Livnat, Zohar, and Gonen Dori-Haconen. 2013. “The Effect of Irony in Radio Talk-Back Programs in Israel.” In The Pragmatics of Political Discourse: Explorations across cultures, ed. by Anita Fetzer, 193–217. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manno, Giuseppe. 1999. “Le remerciement prospectif, ou la condensation de l’échange directif. Pour une conception plus dialogale des actes de discours.” Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 52: 203–235.Google Scholar
. 2002. “La politesse et l’indirection: un essai de synthèse.” Langage et société 100: 5–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcoccia, Michel. 2016. Analyser la communication numérique écrite. Malakoff: Armand Colin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mullany, Louise. 2007. Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mumby, Dennis, and R. Clair. 1997. “Organizational Discourse.” In Discourse as Structure and Process: Discourse Studies 2 – A Multidisciplinary Introduction, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 181–205. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Newlands, Alison, Anne H. Anderson, and Jim Mullin. 2003. “Adapting Communicative Strategies to Computer Mediated Communication: An Analysis of Task Performance and Dialogue Structure.” Applied Cognitive Psychology 17 (3): 325–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Panckhurst, Rachel. 1999. “Analyse linguistique assistée par ordinateur du courriel.” In Internet, communication et langue française, ed. by Jacques Anis, 55–70. Paris: Hermès Science.Google Scholar
Saito, Junko, and Haruko Minegishi Cook. (2017). “Directives in Workplace Discourse.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace, ed. by Bernadette Vine, 203–215. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1975. “Indirect Speech Acts.” In Syntax and Semantics Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
. 1979. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, Lisa A. 2002. Business E-Mail: How to Make it Professional and Effective. San Anselmo, CA: Writing & Editing at Work.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sproull, Lee, and Sara Kiesler, S. 1986. “Reducing Social Context Cues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication.” Management Science 32 (11): 1492–1512. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watzlawick, P., Janet B. Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson. 1967. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Weizman, Elda. 2008. Positioning in Media Dialogue. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yus, Francesco. 2011. Cyberpragmatics: Internet-Mediated Communication in Context. Amsterdam /Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Merzouki, Hocine, Nada Matta & Hassan Atifi
2022. Competency Detection from Interactions Within Communities of Practice. SN Computer Science 3:1 DOI logo
Merzouki, Hocine, Nada Matta & Hassan Atifi
2023. 2023 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), ► pp. 4885 ff. DOI logo
Merzouki, Hocine, Nada Matta, Hassan Atifi & Francois Rauscher
2022. Competency Manifestation Clues within Interactions in Computer Mediated Communication. Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences 1:5 ► pp. 167 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.