Exploring Politeness in Business Emails

Reviews / Votes

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-a-vis a number of relevant social factors. * Patricia Bou-Franch, Universitat de Valencia, Spain * 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. * Jean-Marc Dewaele, Birkbeck, University of London, UK * 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). * Ronald Geluykens, University of Oldenburg, Germany * [This] is a well-written book that provides valuable insights into the choice of head act strategies, request modification in business directive emails and how these are determined by the interpersonal parameters of the interaction. -- Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University, Belgium * LINGUIST List 31.1983 * A key advantage of Freytag's book is that it brings together politeness research and fully fledged cross-cultural pragmatics [...] The book makes an excellent contribution to the field in this respect, as it incorporates various notions that have been widely used in recent politeness theory, such as 'emic evaluations' into analytical repertoire of contrastive cross-cultural analysis. -- Daniel Z Kadar, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China * Pragmatics and Society 11:4 *