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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. 227–254

Chapter 9
“You are the best!”

Relational practices in emails in English at a Norwegian university

ORCID logo | University of Stavanger
ORCID logo | University of Niš
This study investigates relational practices in developing email conversations between interactants performing various institutional roles at a Norwegian university. Three variables were examined: conversational progression, institutional roles, and social distance. Conversational progression was found to exert an influence on increasing familiarity in closing sequences. The openings and closings in the conversations between faculty members tended to orient to familiarity to a greater extent than in most other institutional role dyads, while the widest variety and the highest frequency of relational moves outside the framing moves appeared in faculty – PhD fellow conversations. Social distance was identified as a driver of deference in both openings and closings, while its influence on the frequency of occurrence of other relational moves was limited.
Keywords: relational practices, institutional emails, conversational progression, institutional roles, social distance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Context
    • 2.2Data
    • 2.3Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Opening sequences
    • 3.2Closing sequences
    • 3.3Relational moves outside openings and closings
    • 3.4Examples
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.328.09sav
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ren, Wei
2022. Second Language Pragmatics, DOI logo

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