Филологические науки/ 7. Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация

Сиборова О.Л.

Східноєвропейський університет економіки і менеджменту,Черкаси, Україна

E-Politeness of Native & Non-native Speakers

It is commonly believed that in order to interact successfully and achieve communicative purposes appropriately speakers of a language must master sociolinguistic and pragmatic norms. Over the past decade with the expansion of the Internet, the usage of pragmatics in computer-mediated communication performed by native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of English has received a great deal of attention. Particular attention is paid to the usage of pragmatics by NNS when making e-mail requests. The most common problems which non-native students seem to encounter while dealing with e-mail requests are inappropriate salutation, abbreviations, closing, tone and style, and level of politeness.

On the one hand, NNS quite often employ specific pragmatic strategies, such as extensive expressions of appreciation, complements, mitigating devices and frequent uses of politeness markers, which may influence the level of politeness and negatively affect the perlocution of their English e-mails, which thus may sound too polite. On the other hand some of the NNS messages lack politeness and even sound, which is attributed to the use of direct and indirect request strategies (e.g. imperatives “Please extend the due date”, direct questions “When do you have time?” and hints), frequent time intensifiers such as “ASAP”, terribly sorry or terribly + adjective, as well as upgraders, such as all capital letters and exclamation marks (“FIRST ASSIGNMENT!”, “Thank you!”), disarmers (“Although I know I exceeded the deadline, but I ask if you can give me another chance.”), repeated uses of extensive expressions of appreciation and politeness markers (e.g. “thank you”, “I am grateful”, “I would really appreciate it”, “please”, etc.), syntactic expletives, etc. In fact, “please” is preferred non-native speakers and often used by not as a politeness marker but in a way that makes the utterance sound requestive. By contrast, native speakers are more likely to utilize subjectivisers (e.g. “I’m afraid”, “I think”, “I was wondering if you could”, “I wonder”, etc.). In addition, NNS messages contain fewer downgraders and other mitigating supportive moves such as grounders and apologies, which negatively affect the impact of the requests.

The verb “apologize” or the noun “apology” are more frequently used by native speakers to express their apologies, while none-native speakers tend to use the word “sorry” although “sorry” is the most frequent announcement of apology in spoken English, while forms of “apologize” are more common in formal situations and in writing. Moreover, non-native speakers are inclined to intensify their apologies by “very”, “deeply”, “really” (e.g. “I’m very sorry for …”) or even by double intensifiers (“I’m terribly, terribly sorry”). Apologies can also be announced implicitly by stating the reasons and specifying the obstacles that make it difficult to achieve the objectives. To provide reasons native speakers indicate a problem by negative expressions such as “Unfortunately”, “unable to”, subordinate conjunctions such as “because (of)”, “since”, “due to”, “as” and adversative conjunctions (e.g. “but”, “yet”, “therefore”, “however”, “although”, etc.). At the same time e-massages produced by NNS are short of the variety of expressions and mainly employ adverb clauses introduced by “because” and the adversative conjunction “but”. It is worth mentioning that whereas the NS form the request in “Requesting” followed by “Apologizing” or “Giving reasons” pattern, NNS prefer the “Apologizing” or “Giving reasons” followed by “Requesting” pattern.

Other features illustrating the non-native speakers’ unawareness of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic rules as well as violation of netiquette guidelines concern such e-mail moves as “Opening”, “Identifying self”, “Ending politely” and “Closing”. To begin with native speakers usually provide a subject of a message in the subject field, while the non-native speakers usually omit it at all. Secondly, NNS do not provide identification, whereas the NS do. As a rule NNS employ the informal linguistic opening “Hello”/ “Hi” while NS prefer conventional greeting “Dear”. Although both NS and NNS usually end the body of the e-mail message with a conventional polite ending, non-native speakers are more likely to use a limited set of expressions such as “Thank you (very much)” and “I will be thankful”, while native speakers use a variety of common endings such as “I look forward to your reply”, or “Thank you ((so/very) much in advance) for your time/consideration”, or “I appreciate your time/consideration” [3].

In conclusion we can say that in general, NNS employ pragmatic strategies that negatively affect the perlocution of their English e-mail requests. One of the most noticeable differences between the pragmatic features of NS and NNS e-mail requests has to do with level of politeness.

Література:

1. Ford S. “Dear, Mr Shawn”: A lesson in e-mail pragmatics. / S. Ford // TESOL Journal – V.12. – 2003. – Pp. 38-40.

2. Kasange L. A. Requests in English by second-language users / L. A. Kasange, // ITL, Review of Applied Linguistics – 1998. – Pp. 123-153.

3. Al-Ali Mohammed Nahar An Investigation into the Generic Features of English Requestive E-mail Messages : http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/LSP/article/viewFile/

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