Content area
Full Text
This study, framed within the field of Computer-Mediated Discourse (Crystal 2006; Herring 2003), has two aims: first, it examines pragmalinguistic variation in the opening and closing moves in email messages (L2 Spanish and L1 English) sent from US undergraduate university-level students to their instructors of Spanish; second, it analyzes variation by gender to investigate the impact of this sociolinguistic variable on language use. The actional level and the macro-social factor of gender were used as the units of analysis for the present study (Barron & Schneider 2009). The data are analyzed with regard to the types of opening and closing moves and their frequency in 320 email messages sent by male and female students (200 written in L2 Spanish; 120 in L1 US English). Results are discussed with regard to pragmalinguistic variation in opening and closing moves, variation by gender, formal and informal features of email discourse, and politeness practices in learner-instructor cyber consultations in a foreign language context.
1 Introduction
Email communication in academic and non-academic contexts is ubiquitous. In academic settings email is by now the most preferred, pervasive, and efficient means of communication between students and instructors. Although openings (e.g. salutations, titles) and closings (e.g. farewells, signature) are optional elements of email messages, their presence helps maintain (or reinforce) the social relationships between the sender and the receiver. Similarly, their absence may hinder future communication or be perceived as impolite or inappropriate behavior by the recipient. One important feature of openings and closings in email discourse is the wide range of pragmalinguistic variation (Bou-Franch 2011; Crystal 2006; Kankaanranta 2005). The presence or absence of these elements in email discourse is constrained by various factors, such as the type of discourse (e.g. institutional vs. conversational), the relationship between the participants, based on factors such as power, distance, and degree of familiarity, frequency of interaction, gender, and the degree of politeness (Herring 2000). From a sociological view, Goffman (1971) refers to greetings and farewells as "access rituals", that is, greetings refer to "increased access" and farewells as "a state of decreased access" (p. 79). And, Brown and Yule (1983) proposed a functional dichotomy of language, namely, the transactional function (e.g. asking a professor for a letter of recommendation) and the interactional function (which...