Request Strategies in Professional E-mail Correspondence: Insights from the United States Workplace

Leopold, Lisa

doi:10.18806/tesl.v32i2.1205

Cited by 10 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 34 publications

(37 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This observation is somewhat in line with findings from the studies on requestive strategies in email writing (Leopold, 2015;Zhu, 2012), which demonstrated that less-proficient English learners tended to use more direct requests and fewer mitigation devices. As shown in the examples above, nearly all the bundles at CELPIP Level 4 are either need-statements or want-statements, while the examples from CELPIP Levels 7 and 10 have slightly more expectation statements (I hope you will or I am hoping for).…”

Section: Stance Bundlessupporting

confidence: 87%

“To Whom It May Concern”: A Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles in Email Writing Tasks in an English Proficiency Test

Li¹,

Volkov²

2017

TCJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Stance Bundlessupporting

confidence: 87%

“To Whom It May Concern”: A Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles in Email Writing Tasks in an English Proficiency Test

Li¹,

Volkov²

2017

TCJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As Blum-Kulka, Kasper and House (1989) state, the head act "is the core of the request sequence" (p.275). Many studies such as Leopold (2015), Ross (2018) and Kong (2006) have used this notion of a head act to analyze requests in two parts: the request, and supporting moves. This approach allows researchers to investigate what the actual request is and what requesters add to the request to make it less threatening.…”

Section: Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ability to participate in this critical component of work is just as important as being able to complete required tasks in order to be successful at work (HOLMES, 2005). Requests -when a speaker wants a hearer to complete an action or share information -are necessary in the workplace (HO, 2018) but the imposing nature of requests may make them difficult to form (LEOPOLD, 2015) (YATES, 2010b). E-mails that are primarily sent to make a request, also called request e-mails, have been reported as intimidating for some employees in a new work setting (LEOPOLD, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Requests -when a speaker wants a hearer to complete an action or share information -are necessary in the workplace (HO, 2018) but the imposing nature of requests may make them difficult to form (LEOPOLD, 2015) (YATES, 2010b). E-mails that are primarily sent to make a request, also called request e-mails, have been reported as intimidating for some employees in a new work setting (LEOPOLD, 2015). Having knowledge of all the different forms and mitigation devices that make an utterance (BAKHTIN, 1986) realized as a requestor pragmalinguistic conventions of requests -is useful when forming requests.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Workplace requests: A critical literature review

Lapierre

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Workplace literacies is an area that has attracted a growing number of researchers. Being workplace literate, or being able to use appropriate language and types of communication in a new workplace, is a difficult task for many new employees, especially those whose first language is different from the one used at work (MURPHY, 2010). Requests as a type of workplace communication can pose additional challenges because of their facethreatening nature (BROWN; LEVINSON, 1987). This review synthesizes literature on such types of workplace communication as oral requests and request e-mails. Key theoretical underpinnings of research on requests in the workplace, conventions and features of e-mail, request strategies based on levels of directness, and supportive moves that mitigate requests are discussed. Differences between oral requests and request e-mails in the workplace are found, and pedagogical implications are provided.

show abstract

“…There is also a growing body of work on workplace emails, examining both structural and pragmatic aspects, such as politeness and power relations (e.g. Gimenez 2006, Waldvogel 2007, Gilbert 2012, De Felice 2013, Prabhakaran and Rambow 2013, Leopold 2015, McKeown and Zhang 2015, Kim and Lee 2017. The work presented in this paper is a contribution to this field.…”

Section: Background: Workplace Discourse and Corpus Pragmatics Politementioning

confidence: 99%

Politeness at Work in the Clinton Email Corpus: A First Look at the Effects of Status and Gender

Felice

Garretson

2018

Corpus Pragmatics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article introduces the Clinton Email Corpus, comprising 33,000 recently released email messages sent to and from Hillary Clinton during her tenure as United States Secretary of State, and presents the results of a first investigation into the effect of status and gender on politeness-related linguistic choices within the corpus, based on a sample of 500 emails. We describe the composition of the corpus and mention the technical challenges inherent in its creation, and then present the 500-email subset, in which all messages are categorized according to sender and recipient gender, position in the workplace hierarchy, and personal closeness to Clinton. The analysis looks at the most frequent bigrams in each of these subsets as a starting point for the identification of linguistic differences. We find that the main differences relate to the content and function of the messages rather than their tone. Individuals lower in the hierarchy but not in Clinton's inner circle are more often engaged in practical tasks, while members of the inner circle primarily discuss issues and use email to arrange in-person conversations. Clinton herself is generally found to engage neither in extensive politeness nor in overt displays of power. These findings present further evidence of how corpus linguistics can be used to advance our understanding of workplace pragmatics.

show abstract

Request Strategies in Professional E-mail Correspondence: Insights from the United States Workplace

Cited by 10 publications

References 34 publications

“To Whom It May Concern”: A Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles in Email Writing Tasks in an English Proficiency Test

“To Whom It May Concern”: A Study on the Use of Lexical Bundles in Email Writing Tasks in an English Proficiency Test

Workplace requests: A critical literature review

Politeness at Work in the Clinton Email Corpus: A First Look at the Effects of Status and Gender

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About