Impoliteness and face management through email in bilingual Argentine workplace environments

In this thesis, the phenomenon of impoliteness is studied in two multinational companies based in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. These workplace environments have institutional characteristics, with private organizational purposes, and being interlinguistic Spanish-English and intercultural Argentine-American sites. The study focuses on impoliteness exercised through emails written in a variant of English identified as lingua franca. The selected communicative medium and textual genre is strongly normalized and regulated, it has transactional and procedural functions and is central to the execution of work tasks. The study is limited to a community of practice of impoliteness, identified as the main unit of extralinguistic analysis and formed in the said work environments and corresponding textual genre. The analyzed data were collected during the period 2012-2014.

The theoretical-methodological framework integrates different analytical categories developed in the area of study known as Sociocultural Pragmatics. These categories enable seeking macro-structural tendencies of production and evaluation of activities of impoliteness. The data gathered constitute a natural and non-natural corpus, facilitated by Argentine employees from both work environments. The non-natural corpus was collected through a pilot study, two questionnaires, interviews and public business information on the Internet. The natural information consists of emails donated for the study by eight informants in direct or indirect contact with the researcher during the study period.

To accomplish the main purpose of this study, three research questions are formulated. The first concerns the perceptions of participating Argentine employees about impoliteness in their work environments. The second systematizes the ways of reacting to a particular act of impoliteness. The third involves the modalization of impoliteness through deontic resources and strategies based on the general notion of responsibility.

For the first question, four functions of English as lingua franca were identified in relation to impoliteness: providing or requesting information, requesting labor action and providing opinion, advice or suggestion. These four functions acquire their own characteristics around impoliteness. On the other hand, it was found that difficult, negative or conflictive situations or attitudes are communicated through emails when referring to negativity or general conflictivity, administrative infractions, error notification, unfavorable or damaging decisions, and counterproductivity. In such situations or attitudes, five notions of impoliteness were identified: impropriety, disregard, imposition, evasion and aggressiveness. Role facework is inferred related to the desires of being seen or to be seen as a part or representative of a structure, as a member or peer among the members of a group, as a resource or product of a work team, or as an opposing member of a group or a team.

For the second question, the reactive design is set on a first option that includes strategies aimed at accepting or not accepting the act of impoliteness by the addressee involved in such communicative activity. If accepted, there is a difference between terminal and non-terminal reactions for it. If the act is not accepted and it is decided to counteract it, then the strategies can be defensive or offensive. If they are defensive, strategies may enable an open defense or a closed defense. Offensive strategies are aimed at causing offense. This strategic reactive design is proposed when facing an act of impoliteness, according to the face-threat compromised, the offense caused or the face-balance sought.

For the third question, the concept of modalization is used to describe the emotional, mental and psychological attitudes presented in different degrees through the language in use. Four strategies of attack or counterattack were identified as deontically modeled within impoliteness: attack by attribution of responsibility, counterattack by impugnment or forced compliance of responsibility and attack or counterattack by naturalization of responsibility. Through these strategies, face is de-idealized, devalued and diminished with the ulterior purpose of reconstituting the moral order that strengthens the business status quo. These strategies are illustrated with two examples of email sequences where the unilateral and bilateral exercise of impoliteness is identified.

The analysis shows how impoliteness is perceived, reacted towards one of its acts and presented in a communicative activity. It is considered that the results obtained are useful to better understand the exercise of impoliteness in Argentine work environments and involving situations of English-Spanish interlinguistic contact. Other studies are required to obtain more empirical data to contrast different environments and communities of practice. Continuing with this research topic or with related lines would be a beneficial transfer for Argentine users of English as a lingua franca.