Freytag's study analyzes how politeness is expressed in directives in business emails written by British English (BE) users and Peninsular Spanish (PS) users. It contributes to the field of pragmatics by addressing several gaps in politeness research: the relative lack of studies based on natural communication and of studies comparing directives in two languages in multilingual workplaces through Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), especially emails. To fill these gaps, Freytag compared and contrasted directives in 600 business emails between users of BE and PS, who were either business partners or coworkers in the tourism industry.
This study innovatively utilized mixed methods, using data collected through a questionnaire, observations, and interviews. A coding scheme based on Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, & Gabriele Kasper (Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies, 1989) was used for data analysis. Freytag quantitatively compared head act strategies (the strategies that are used in the core of the request sequence, which realizes the request) and modification strategies (the supportive moves that appear before or after head act) between users of BE and PS; then, she explored how different social variables influenced the use of each strategy. Following the speech event-based analysis proposed by Dell Hymes (‘Models of the interaction of language and social life’, 1972), Freytag investigated both illocutionary values and interactional values in this research.
Two key findings suggested that writers of BE and PS used a similar set of strategies but with different frequencies, and whether those strategies were perceived as polite or impolite depended on workplace context and the language they used. Other findings included that some head act strategies led to more use of modification strategies, and upgraders (supportive moves that aggravate the request) and directive strategies (strategies that express direct force) were preferred because business contexts emphasized ‘urgency and task-efficiency’.
As for the influence of various social and contextual variables, while sex did not have a significant effect on the selection of directive strategies, all of the other factors (social distance (SD), ranking of imposition, power, and purpose) influenced writers’ choice. More specifically, there was a positive correlation between SD and directive strategies, whereas there was a negative correlation between ranking of imposition and directive strategies. Moreover, power between the writers and purpose of email interaction both impacted the choice of directive strategies.
The author concludes the book by reiterating that contexts play a major role in linguistic choices and arguing, among other things, for more mixed-methods studies that collect naturally occurring data from different channels of communication need. Furthermore, Freytag advocates that people in the workplace should build their awareness of sociocontextual factors that influence language choice so as to develop their pragmatic competence and their strategies for writing emails.
This book makes a unique contribution to the methodology in politeness by analyzing naturally occurring data using both quantitative and qualitative methods while also revealing the complexity of business CMC among speakers of different languages. The insights it provides are valuable for researchers in the field of intercultural communication as well as those who work in professional training and management of international workplaces.
