Interethnic Workplace E-mail Communication: An Investigation into Politeness Strategies

摘要

The use of email in business communication might be troublesome in the sense that the language of emails is generally theorized as a mixture of spoken and written varieties. This possibility might even increase further among communicators who belong to different ethnic backgrounds as they have different perspectives to communication and expectations of how messages should be structured. Research shows that politeness strategies used by native speakers might be viewed in an unpleasant way by non-native speakers and vice versa; however, very little research has been done pertaining politeness strategies used by different types of non-native speakers. Drawing upon Brawn and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory, this study investigates politeness strategies used in Malaysian workplace emails.