Non-native English Politeness in English E-mail Requests: Non-native Reader Evaluations of Non-native Writers.
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2022-06-13
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
The growth of multinational organisations has led to increased international business communication between non-native English (NNE) speakers. This has consequently raised questions about the interlocutors differing pragmatic competencies. Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research has found NNE speakers to deviate from the native English (NE) speaker norms, for example in their use of linguistic modification strategies. Little research has focused on the influence of the deviations on interpersonal evaluations of NNE writers made by NNE readers, even though it could be deemed highly important in the growing international communication contexts. Therefore, the present study investigated the impact of NNE politeness in professional e-mail requests on personal and message evaluations made by NNE speakers. Moreover, the knowledge of the e-mail writer’s foreign origin was manipulated to investigate its influence the personal and message evaluations. In an online experiment, 192 NNE speakers took part in a between subjects study in which they evaluated an e-mail message and its writer. The findings indicate that the levels of politeness and the knowledge of foreign origin influenced the evaluations of the messages and NNE writer to a certain extent. The NNE writer was found to be evaluated more positively on likeability when the level of politeness was moderate and the foreign origin was known. Furthermore, the findings suggest that NNE readers have a relatively positive perception of the NNE writers and their messages overall. This both supports and contradicts previous ILP studies on interpersonal evaluations concerning e-mail requests. The findings complement the knowledge on NNE-NNE e-mail communication and provide NNE speaking professionals insights on the consequences of their pragmalinquistic capabilities.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren