Polite impoliteness? How power, gender and language background shape request strategies in English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) in corporate email exchanges

Hofweber, J. and Jaworska, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7465-2245 (2022) Polite impoliteness? How power, gender and language background shape request strategies in English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) in corporate email exchanges. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 11 (2). pp. 223-253. ISSN 2191-933X doi: 10.1515/jelf-2022-2085

Abstract/Summary

International business is increasingly conducted through the medium of English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF). Yet, little is known about interactional strategies in BELF, specifically in internal written business communications. Our study turns to this hitherto less explored area and investigates one of the most important speech acts in the context of workplace communication, i.e. requests. The data under study come from a unique corpus of 398 authentic internal emails produced by the multilingual employees of an international insurance corporation. Using a combination of corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytical methods, we identify and classify request strategies formulated by BELF users with 10 diverse L1 backgrounds, and assess how their choice of pragmatic strategies might be influenced by their lingua-cultural background as well as extralinguistic factors, notably the email senders’ power position within the corporate hierarchy and their gender. Across the corpus, the level of directness in request strategies was high, suggesting that most BELF users prioritised ‘getting the job done’. Yet, the directness of email senders’ request strategies was modulated by a complex interaction between lingua-cultural factors, power position and gender. The most crucial observation was that high-power employees chose more direct strategies than low-power employees, but this pattern was modulated by their lingua-cultural background and by gender.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/109318
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Uncontrolled Keywords	English as a Lingua Franca, Business English, English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF), Politeness, Request strategies, Intercultural communication, Corporate Communication, Emails
Publisher	De Gruyter
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