Verbal politeness in academic asynchronous interaction: contrastive analysis in English, Spanish and Italian

Abstract

The fast development of new technologies has caused email to be a resource used increasingly widespread in academic interaction. Although the relevance of knowledge of pragmatic rules of communication effectiveness has been shown, most current educational programs usually disregard this aspect. Thus, the lack of contrasted references to locate cultural differences produces a transfer of pragmatic strategies of the speaker’s culture to his discourse in L2. This article attempts to identify the politeness strategies used in a corpus of request emails produced in an academic environment, with the aim of explaining the similarities or differences found in the rhetorical style of three languages: Spanish, English and Italian. Thereby, the analysis provides contrasted references with an empirical basis that facilitate the task of identifying the mentioned differences.