Breaking the Rules and Searching for Standards in E-mail Exchanges Between Academics

Abstract

AbstractThe Chapter aims to establish some focal points for further, more detailed investigation of e-mail communication between scholars using English as their lingua franca. On the basis of a corpus of approximately one thousand electronic letters the study highlights a number of intriguing features of this relatively new form of communication. Employing the concept of International University (Björkman 2011), the author makes an attempt to define and describe the community of language users whose main communicative channel comes in form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). A significant factor contributing to the homogeneity of this idealised speech community is their professional background as employees of academic institutions, dealing with matters related to research, dissemination of scientific concepts and ideas and organisation of higher education. The language which is used in interactions between the members of the global scientific community is usually English. Given the characteristics of the group of users and the dominating communicative goals, it may be characterised as a peculiar form of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), in this particular case English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The research on Academic English has already accumulated bulky volumes and managed to produce detailed typologies of various genres, such as lectures, conference presentations, seminar discussions, office hours exchanges, research papers, book reviews, dissertations of all kinds, feedback comments on students’ work, and many others. Unquestionably, electronic letters exchanged between academics constitute a peculiar, albeit somewhat peripheral genre within broadly understood Academic English, which has been recognised a long time ago (Gains 1999: 81). The investigation, employing selective qualitative text analysis of the corpus, focuses on such issues as participant configurations (manifested mainly in the addresative forms used by writers), linguistic encoding of power relationships and social distance (connected with the issues pertaining to linguistic politeness) and metadiscursive elements in the interaction. Additionally, an attempt is made to pinpoint characteristic features of the English language used as a lingua franca in electronic mails, on the background of L1 English as used by native speakers. Finally, interesting examples of diversified, local uses of the English language by Polish native speakers are provided and contrasted with the forms employed in international communication within ELF paradigm, echoing the distinction between the local and the global variety of English proposed by Brutt-Griffler (2002: 174–176). In the final part of the paper the contexts shaping the formal and interactional characteristics of academic ELF are described in terms of a Self-Organising System (Gibbs 2005; 2011), followed by suggestions for further research.KeywordsNative SpeakerInvitation LetterElectronic MailElectronic LetterInvisible CollegeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.