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Email Pragmatics and Second Language Learners
Edited by Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis, Milica Savić and Nicola Halenko
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 328] 2021
► pp. 179–202

Chapter 7
Email communication in English and in German

A contrastive pragmatic investigation of German university students’ emails sent to university staff in their native and foreign language

ORCID logo | University of Erfurt
This semi-longitudinal investigation examines greetings and closings in emails written by German university students in their native and foreign language. The results reveal students’ preference for formal greetings in both English and German. However, the data also suggest that not all students were aware of appropriate address term combinations in formal English emails. Regarding closings, the students used a limited set of standard formal closings in English but employed a greater variety of closing strategies in German. The results further revealed the importance of micro-analysing individual students’ contributions in a corpus, as this provides insights into an individual’s language use over time and also shows the impact individual students’ routine preferences can have on group scores.
Keywords: greetings, openings, salutations, leave-takings, closings, address terms (terms of address), EFL, German, institutional discourse, student emails
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Greetings
    • 2.2Closings
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Greetings
    • 4.2Closings
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.328.07sch
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