Getting stuff done: Comparing e-mail requests from students in higher education in Britain and Australia

Abstract

A small corpus of student e-mail requests to academic staff in a British and an Australian university was collected in order to investigate the cross-cultural nature of Englishes in these requesting events. The notions of ACCOUNT and BUT-JUSTIFICATION, together with the concepts of EQUITY and EQUILIBRIUM are used to explicate the distribution of various features associated with these requests. Results indicate that the British data orient to deferential DEPENDENCE whereas the Australian data exhibit interdependent EGALITARIANISM. Finally, the process of our analysis brings to light the fact that we ought to refine Heider's (1958) theory of OBLIGATION and this, we do. The overall claims of this paper are that the situated nature of student e-mail requests can have a great bearing on the discursive construction of student identities, that this has a bearing on how things get done, and that how things get done in different varieties of English merits further investigation.

Complimenting behaviour on Facebook

“…This was a phenomenon first noted by Werry (1996) whilst studying Internet-Relay-Chat (IRC) where multiple participants can join a conversation. On the other hand, Merrison et al (2012) consider the effects of asynchronous communication specifically in their study of requesting behaviour in emails. They describe emails as a "one-shot" process (a term coined by Clark 1996) in which supplicants must achieve all their goals in a single e-mail: both communicating their request and generating adequate rapport (Merrison et al 2012(Merrison et al , 1081.…”

“…On the other hand, Merrison et al (2012) consider the effects of asynchronous communication specifically in their study of requesting behaviour in emails. They describe emails as a "one-shot" process (a term coined by Clark 1996) in which supplicants must achieve all their goals in a single e-mail: both communicating their request and generating adequate rapport (Merrison et al 2012(Merrison et al , 1081. In combination with the lack of paralinguistic cues available in face-to-face communication, the one-shot aspect of e-mails means that users take great care in the composition of their requests leading to a tendency to over-emphasise the usual norms of politeness customary within a particular group, as shown in Duthler's (2006) work comparing email and voicemail.…”

Evaluating while justifying intercultural requests

“…Cross-cultural research has focused on such aspects as (1) the request directness realized as one of the nine strategies identified in Blum-Kulka et al's (1989: 278-281) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (e.g., Economidou-Kogetsidis 2003Fĕlix-Brasdefer 2009); (2) the internal request modification, that is, linguistic modification within the request head act (e.g., Economidou-Kogetsidis 2010; Hendriks 2010; Lin 2009); and (3) the external request modification, that is, linguistic modification outside of the request head act (e.g., Al-Ali and Rami 2010;Faerch and Kasper 1989;Merrison et al 2012). These studies have attempted to characterize the requestive behavior of individuals from different cultures.…”

“…In view of the importance and popularity of the interaction between individuals across borders, a vast body of research has been undertaken to inform communicators and researchers of the lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic features of such interaction. Studies have focused on the linguistic behavior of individuals communicating with others of either the same cultural background (e.g., Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989;Economidou-Kogetsidis 2005;Fĕlix-Brasdefer 2009;Merrison, Wilson, Davies, and Haugh 2012) or a different cultural background (e.g., Grainger, Mill, and Sibanda 2010;Handford and Matous 2011;Rogerson-Revell 2007;Sharifian 2010). Among these studies, request is one of the speech acts that has received most research attention worldwide in the past few decades (e.g., Economidou-Kogetsidis 2010;Fukushima 1996;Lin 2009;Liu 2011;Lundell and Ermanb 2012).…”

“…Various aspects of the genre like language, functions, and structure have been studied extensively (e.g. Bloch 2002;Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011;Hendriks 2010;Ho 2011a;Lee 2004;Merrison et al 2012). The present study explores the use of the language of evaluation in the grounders for requests made via email.…”