Impoliteness in Spanish university students’ emails
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Abstract
The aim of this small-scale study is to analyse the impoliteness markers in authentic emails with a high-imposition request sent by university students to their professor. The results reveal that in the email structure the student’s identification tends to be omitted, students opt for tú versus usted and past and conditional tenses are used to mitigate imposition together with more direct forms (imperatives) which do not mitigate it. It is remarkable the presence of typographical and orthographical mistakes together with an overuse of punctuation. These impoliteness markers result in overly informal and disrespectful emails, taking into account they are first-contact highly-impositive emails. For this reason, there is a need to teach university students how to write more deferent emails in order to avoid possible negative reactions on the professors’ part. Moreover, students need to develop their pragmatic awareness in asymmetric interactions in which power or social distance relationships are at stake.
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Funding data
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Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Grant numbers PID2020-117959GBI00 -
Generalitat Valenciana
Grant numbers AICO/2021/310 -
Universitat Jaume I
Grant numbers Projectes d’Innovació Educativa de la Unitat de Suport Educatiu de la Universitat Jaume I (51020/24).
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