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electronic mail communication in a multinational company whose offices the world
over use English as a Lingua Franca for internal inter-office communication would not
only be the proper conclusion of my degree course in Communication for business and
the international organizations, but also provide existent research with a new case study
which could shed further light on electronic mail communication in business setting – in
particular in multinational corporations - and on the emerging features of ELF as
written by native and non-native speakers.
Materials for this case study comprise 1154 email messages collected during my
internship at the Modena branch of JAS – a multinational freight forwarding company.
The company kindly allowed me to collect email messages exchanged between the
Modena office export department and on the one hand JAS offices in the US, and on the
other hand JAS offices in Far East countries, in particular China, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Korea, and Japan.
Based on these materials, the present study will focus on three major areas:
1. Electronic mail communication
By reviewing relevant literature on business electronic mail communication, I will
present the debate about the generic status of email and its distinctive features (e.g.
email language) – for this purpose, I will offer the notion of genre of organizational
communication by Yates and Orlikowski (1992) – and special attention will be given to
the notion of embeddedness provided by Gimenez (2005, 2006a,2006b). In this regard,
the present study will try to answer to the following questions: can business email be
regarded as a genre in its own right? Does an email language exist? If yes, what are its
features?
2. English as a Lingua Franca and World Englishes
In the background and literature review section, I will present the current debate
about English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) between those who maintain that ELF
performances by non-native speakers should conform to standard native norms, and
those who claim that non-native Englishes (World Englishes) are acceptable in so far as
deviations from the norm do not jeopardize mutual intelligibility. By taking up the
second stance I will offer the notion of ELF core. To complete the picture, I will give a
brief sociolinguistic and linguistic overview of the Englishes in the countries under
investigation by following the classification of World Englishes proposed by Kachru
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(1992). The subsequent analysis aims at finding if and to what extent regional
deviations preserve / endanger intelligibility, describing the differences between native
and non-native Englishes, and particular traits of the local Englishes emerging from the
data.
3. Intercultural communication
Culture is – among others - an important variable in communication. In
consideration of the fact that communication in multinational corporations – here with
reference to branches in different countries – takes place between people from different
cultural backgrounds, I believe that dimensions of cultural variability may represent one
of the parameters for explaining divergences in linguistic choices and pragmatic
realizations. In particular, this study refers to the cultural dimensions of individualism /
collectivism and power distance proposed by Hofstede (2005) as illustrated in the first
part of this study. Attention is then devoted to the notion of politeness; the seminal
framework of politeness theory by Brown and Levinson (1987) will be the point of
reference for explaining variations at intercultural delicate points in business emails
such as openings, closings, and requests (requesting the colleague to do something is the
primary motive for sending an e-mail). In the analysis, this study will put forward
hypothesis about cultural motives determining specific linguistic performances as soon
as particular language features or pragmatic variations emerge from the analysis.
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PART I
BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW
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1. ELECTRONIC MAIL COMMUNICATION IN BUSINESS CONTEXT
“On a dark December day in 1980 when the
temperature was nearly 40 degrees below zero and the
valley in which Fairbanks, Alaska, lies was filled with
chocking ice fog that glittered brilliantly in the campus
lights, Suzie Scollon proposed an idea to Ron Scollon
that radically changed our lives. Five years before the
invention of the Internet she proposed that we use the
internal electronic mail system of the University of
Alaska Computer Network (UACN) to teach university
classes, to communicate across faculty, and to
communicate between faculty and students who lived
across the 1280-mile span of Alaska where there were
UACN facilities […].” (Scollon / Scollon 2004: vii)
This was one of the first non-military e-mail networks. From these early days, the
electronic mail - risen as a facility of the Internet - has witnessed a fast growth rate of
users in the 1980s, it has exploded in the 1990s, becoming one of the most used means
of communication the world over. The passage conveys an idea of the enormous
potentiality of the medium in a world which aims to “go global” but in which the means
of transport – even if remarkably faster than ever before – do not equal the immediacy
of electronic communication.
Electronic mail is a unique medium (Crystal 2006:130): “a cross between a
conversation and a letter, email is as fast as a telegram and as cheap as a whisper”,
“faster than a speeding letter, cheaper than a phone call”. Thus, electronic mail allows
users to send written messages which are delivered cheaply and immediately to the
intended recipient(s). For this reason, it is often preferred to the postal service – the
“snail mail” compared to the immediate delivery of electronic mail (Shortis 2001 in
Mallon / Opperheim 2002:8). Thanks to this potentiality and other qualities the use of
electronic mail has rapidly spread in business and it has progressively supplanted the
paper-based letter or memos.
This section will first present the debate about the generic status of email and its
distinctive features. In this regard, I will offer the notion of genre of organizational
communication by Yates and Orlikowski (1992), and a brief overview on the literature
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about the emerging linguistic features of business emails. Special attention will then be
directed to embedded emails as a sub-genre of electronic mail since its use is becoming
more and more frequent and widespread in institutions and businesses. Finally, it will
be described the role of and benefits provided by electronic mail in multinational
corporations composed of a geographically dispersed workforce.
1.1. BUSINESS EMAILS: A GENRE?
Genre, a literary and rhetorical concept aiming at recognizing and classifying
types of discourse, is a slippery term which has accounted for several definitions.
According to Swales (1990, 2004) and Bhatia (1993, 2004), genre “is a recognizable
communicative event characterized by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and
mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in
which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured and conventionalised with
constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and
functional value” (Bhatia 1993:13). Bhatia notices that although there are a number of
other factors to be taken into account for distinguishing a genre, such as content, form,
intended audience, medium; “a genre is primarily characterized by the communicative
purpose(s) that it is intended to fulfil” (p.13). As a consequence, “any major change in
the communicative purpose(s) is likely to give us a different genre; however minor
changes or modifications help us distinguish sub-genre.” Miller (1984:151 in Bargiela-
Chiappini and Nickerson 1999: 8) points out that “a rhetorically sound definition of
genre must be centred not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it
is used to accomplish”.
Reporting the definition given by Mallon and Oppenheim (2002), business emails
are those “written as a part of a paid job. All categories include internal and external e-
mails written by clients/customers to the organization. A distinction is drawn between
personal and impersonal business emails: personal business emails are those where “the
addressee or all of the addresses are known to the writer”, whereas impersonal business
emails are those “where the addressee, or at least one of the addressees is unknown to
the writer” (p. 13).
On this ground, can business email be considered a genre in its own right? As
Gains (1999) rightly points out a genre “must meet the overriding criterion of a shared
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communicative purpose, rather than just similarities in form” (Swales 1990:46, in Gains
1999:98) and she continues by saying that “the fact that the messages share the same
medium of communication and are written in a broadly similar convention does not
qualify them as a group of communicative events of the same type”. Accordingly, the
notion of genre is distinct from the one of medium: electronic mail messages and
electronic mail system should not be confused. However, Yates and Olikowski
(1992:310) notice that “confusion arises when researchers compare genres of
communication (e.g., memos or bulletins) with communication media (e.g., electronic
mail or fax). However, even if they clearly differentiate the notion of genre from the one
of media, they acknowledge a reciprocal influence of the medium on the genre and vice
versa. Business email can thus be regarded as an “over-arching pre-genres, under which
more specific genres […] operate” as advanced by Louhiala-Salminen (1996:49) in her
article which discussed inter alia the generic status of business letters and business
faxes. The “existence of specific genres within the communicative medium of electronic
mail” can therefore be assumed, as in Gains (1999:98).
1.1.1 Email as a genre of organizational communication
Relevant insights for the investigation of the communicative practices within
organizations and of electronic mail are offered by Yates and Olikowski’s (1992) article
on genres of organisational communication. Drawing on Miller’s definition of “genre as
social action” (1984), they introduce the concept of genre of organisational
communication in order to study communication as embedded in social processes. They
define the notion as follows:
“A genre of organizational communication is a
distinctive type of communicative action, characterized
by a socially recognized communicative purpose and
common aspects of form” (Yates and Olikowsky 1994:
543)
The socially recognized communicative purpose depends on the needs of the
discourse community and the context in which the communication takes place. Within
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the pre-genre of business email, it should be possible to identify the genres of
organizational communication (genre repertoire, see Yates / Orlikowski 1994) of the
specific discourse community under investigation. In their case study, Yates and
Orlikowski (1994) identify for instance four different electronic genres: memo genre,
dialogue genre, proposal genre, and ballot genre system. Many studies have found that
business emails carry out different work-related purposes: to inform, to request, to
respond, to promote, to praise or scold, to direct, and occasionally to have fun - just to
mention the results of an investigation (Gains 1999).
Form “refers to the observable physical and linguistic features of the
communication” (Yates/Orlikowski 1992:301). They distinguish three aspects of form
in organizational communication:
1. Communication medium, i.e. “the physical means by which
communication is created, transmitted and stored” (1992:319). As to business email
messages, the medium is obviously the electronic mail system. The medium inevitably
plays an important part in determining and shaping the structural features and language
system of the genre.
2. Structural features. Nickerson (1999) specifies the notion by asserting
that structure “may be best defined in terms of (text) conventions – i.e. those aspects of
form which conventionally contribute to the physical layout of the genre, such as
conventional inclusion of salutation at the beginning of a business letter.” (p.41).
3. Language or symbol system, i.e. “linguistic characteristics such as
formality and the specialized vocabulary of technical or legal jargon” (Yates /
Orlikowki, 1992:302)
Nickerson (2000: 42) notices that such a notion of language is restrictive if
researching in multinational organizations. She distinguishes two aspects of language:
code and discourse.
ξ “Code is […] the choice of an appropriate language for the genre”
ξ “Discourse is its linguistic realisation”
On this basis, if we assume that electronic mail messages – apart from the
medium – are characterized by the same form (i.e. by distinctive structural and
linguistic features), electronic genres of organizational communication can be identified
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according to the main socially recognized communicative purpose they aim to
accomplish in the specific discourse community.
1.1.1.1 Structural features
The format of a single email is composed of a bipartite structure (Crystal
2006:110): a preformatted upper area (header or heading) and a lower area for the main
text (body or message).
1.1.1.1.1 Header
The page header allows limited scope for variation and its structure is generally
dictated by the software. Software designers clearly drew on the familiar memo genre
(which evolved in the 1920s) for structuring the new medium of electronic mail
(Yates/Orlikowski 1992:316). Accordingly, the header contains the following four core
elements:
From: the address of the sender is inserted automatically. It has been found that in
many organizations the From line also provides the sender’s identity (Baron 2001:238).
Date: Date and time in which the message has been sent are inserted
automatically.
To: address(es) of the recipients is written manually or called up from an address-
book. It is an obligatory element.
Subject: It is an optional element used for giving a title to the message. Gains
(1999) finds in his data that all the subjects “related quite closely to the function of the
message, and in general, were not used to grab attention or to make a personal
statement” (Gains 1999:84). It “is important for retrieving past messages and for
following the ‘thread’ of a conversation” (Crystal 2006). It may include the acronyms
RE in replies and FW in forwarded messages.
There are also optional elements which may appear in the header area:
Cc (Carbon copy): address(es) which receive a copy of the message (see section
1.2.1)
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Bcc (Blind carbon copy): address(es) which receive a copy of the message but
without the prime recipient’s knowledge.
Attachments: space in which a symbol (usually a paper-clip) and the name of the
attached file appear
Priority: space in which a symbol (usually an exclamation mark) appears to signal
that the message is urgent. There are various degrees of priority: low, normal, high.
1.1.1.1.2 Body: opening and closing
The lower area of the electronic mail format – the body - contains two recurring
features: opening and closing which show some regularities. Emerging linguistic and
stylistic features of the main text will be discussed later on in section 1.1.1.2.
Opening. Both personal and impersonal business emails typically begin with no
salutation or the use of the name only. This is supported by evidence in Gains’ study
(92% of his emails begin with no opening greeting). Also Crystal
1
(2006:104) notices
that several types of emails begin with no salutation at all; it is the case of
information/instruction distribution within an institution and for general enquiries for
information for the benefit of all (in this case “Dear all” had also been chosen). This is
supported also by Mallon and Oppenheim’s results: in one-to-many business emails no
greeting is commonly preferred to a greeting. This is also the case when responding to a
prior message – being the message perceived as a second pair part in a conversation, a
greeting is not necessary
2
(Crystal 20006: 105). Mallon and Oppenheim (2002) see in
the uncertainty about the conventions of email - “no greeting is better than one that may
be inappropriate” - a plausible reason why no salutation is added.
Coming second, the greeting “Dear + (fist name)” was popular in Mallon and
Oppenheim (2002)’s corpus of impersonal and personal business emails. Also a general
greeting word such as Hello or Hi with or without the intimate name of the recipient is
found to be frequent in Crystal (2006)’s corpus.
1
Crystal (2006) used data taken from his own email messages and emails messages provided by his 23-
year-old son and 26 year-old daughter.
2
Interestingly, the longer the delay in replying the more likely the message will contain a greeting.
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