So rude! The effects of non-native politeness in English emails on non-native peers.
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2022-06-13
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en
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Abstract
In the current age of rapid globalisation, businesses and individuals alike gradually find themselves more and more compelled to operate in English – with differing degrees of fluency, both grammatically and pragmatically. A commonly reported result of non-nativeness is the lack of sensitivity to forms of politeness in speakers’ production acts, a pragmatic shortcoming which typically
results in relatively negative interpersonal evaluations; at least, when being judged by a native speaker. In this paper, it was explored how non-native speakers of English evaluated various request emails by non-native peers, as well as said peers’ personal qualities, based on two variables: 1) the
presence/absence of cues as to the sender’s non-native origin, and 2) different forms of politeness modifications. The results showed that neither variable influenced the participants’ interpersonal
evaluations of the email sender or their ratings of various properties of the emails. This implies that the politeness modifications employed were not noticed by the participants, demonstrating a discrepancy between theory and real-life situations.
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