Politeness and request strategies in Libyan postgraduate students’ e-mails / Ergaya Ali Gerair Alsout
This study aimed primarily to explore the politeness phenomenon in e-mail requests written by international Post Graduate students from Libya as a means of communicating with their lecturers in four selected Malaysian universities; namely Universiti Utara Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Univ...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Published: |
2018
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| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8617/2/Ergaya_Ali.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8617/6/ergaya.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8617/ |
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| Summary: | This study aimed primarily to explore the politeness phenomenon in e-mail requests
written by international Post Graduate students from Libya as a means of communicating
with their lecturers in four selected Malaysian universities; namely Universiti Utara
Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and University of
Malaya. The data consisted of 109 e-mails written to their lecturers by 20 Libyan PG
students who were studying in Malaysia. To fulfill the objectives of this study, the e-mails
were analysed by adopting politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1987) which acted
as the main framework for identifying the politeness strategies. Additionally,
Economidou-Kogetsidis’s (2011) framework, known as Cross Cultural Speech Act
Realization Project (CCSARP) was used to identify the directness level of request head
acts. The internal/external modifications that were evident in the e-mails were also
analysed by using the CCSARP framework. The research method and design used in this
study was essentially qualitative approach. The findings of the current study revealed that
the Libyan PG students applied mostly negative politeness sub-strategies more than the
other politeness sub-strategies. Direct strategies also appeared more frequently than
conventionally indirect strategies. These students in Malaysian universities were seen to
resort to external modifications in greater frequency possibly to minimize the force of
their request imposition. The most used internal modification was the politeness marker
‘please’. This study argues that e-mails which lacked internal modifications, and featuring
a high level of directness, displayed a fundamental inadequacy in the use of politeness
strategies, thus creating potentially a higher chance of pragmatic failure |
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