Investigating E-(Im)Politeness in Pakistani Students’ Emails to Faculty: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The function of language is not only to describe the world but also to transform it through speech acts, which require us to choose our words carefully. Politeness strategies help express solidarity and respect in order to maintain positive social relations. In academic settings, positive relations between teachers and students have been linked to better academic performance. This study investigates linguistic politeness in computer-mediated communication (CMC) in the Pakistani academic context. More specifically, the objectives of this study are to a) identify the politeness strategies in speech acts of request by Pakistani students in their emails to faculty and b) examine how sociocultural factors in Pakistan affect e-(im)politeness in academic email. The current study employs a sequential mixed-methods research design. A corpus of 32358 tokens was compiled from the emails received by 4 instructors of two public-sector universities between 2021 and 2023. Samples from the corpus were analyzed qualitatively using Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) model, and Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s CCSARP framework (1989). The results informed the formulation of hypotheses which were subsequently tested through a computer-assisted corpus-based analysis for triangulation of results. The integrated results shed light on politeness and request strategies in student email requests to faculty, and their relationship with gender and culture in Pakistan is discussed. The findings bridge the gap in the literature by exploring politeness in the Pakistani academic context, contribute to the growing body of corpus-based politeness research, and have implications for educational policymaking in Paki