Exploring Politeness in Business Emails

Offers an innovative approach to the study of politeness

This book explores the contextual complexities of workplace emails by comparing British English and Peninsular Spanish directive speech events. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis the book offers an innovative approach to the study of politeness.

Vera Freytag is a Consumer Interaction Specialist for Beiersdorf AG in Germany. Her research interests include CMC, business discourse, sociolinguistics and politeness.

Vera Freytag is a Consumer Interaction Specialist for Beiersdorf AG in Germany. Her research interests include CMC, business discourse, sociolinguistics and politeness.

This book by Vera Freytag is an important contribution to such diverse fields as cross-cultural pragmatics, institutional discourse, and politeness research. In her analysis of directive speech events in English and Spanish (L1) emails, she employs an innovative mixed-method analysis to reveal the interactive dynamics of computer-mediated communication (CMC).

Politeness is like oil that allows the cogs of human interaction to run smoothly. However, not everybody uses the same oil and the cogs may grind to a halt when the 'wrong oil' is applied. This highly innovative book shows how the cogs function in cross-cultural business communication.

This book is a timely and welcome contribution to the field. It rests on solid interdisciplinary theoretical grounds and employs an innovative, carefully designed methodological framework to examine two comparable data sets of naturally-occurring, socially-situated emails in British English and Peninsular Spanish. Its ethnographically-informed interpretation of the texts sheds fresh light on our understanding of language variation vis-à-vis a number of relevant social factors.