A cross-cultural pragmatic study of rapport-management strategies in Chinese and English academic upward request emails

ABSTRACT

This article discusses and compares how Chinese and English postgraduate students manage a harmonious relationship with university instructors by managing rapport and doing relational work in their academic request emails. The rapport-management strategies were explored and then further evaluated in relation to the taxonomies of relational work within the discourse, illocutionary and stylistic domains. It found that Chinese and British students belong to distinct discourse communities shaped by different and similar discursive practices and norms, which are conditioned not only by different national cultures, but also by a similar community culture. The findings should be able to (1) develop the existing research alike and show how the email behaviour reflects the intricate and dynamic factors of rapport management; (2) support integrating the theories of rapport management and relational work into methodologically sound cross-cultural/intercultural pragmatic studies; (3) enable email writers to maintain or enhance harmonious relationships with recipients so as to obtain request compliance smoothly and to uphold their membership within the discourse community and (4) help readers to learn the pragmatic aspects of native and foreign languages in workplaces.

本研究探究和比较了中英言语社区成员在电子邮件中所使用的和谐管理语用策略的异同，以及影响这些语用表征的国家及社区文化主导下的社会心理因素。该研究势必会：（1）拓展现有的以电子邮件为语料的人际礼貌研究，揭示了和谐关系管理的复杂和动态的因素；（2）将和谐管理理论和关系操作理论相结合，为以后类似的跨文化语用研究提供一个可行的思路；（3）帮助电子邮件撰写者了解在撰写邮件时，怎样保持或提高与收信人的和谐关系，并维护他们各自在言语社区里得体的身份以及请求目的的顺利达成。

KEYWORDS:

• Rapport management
• relational work
• request emails
• discourse community

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my special thanks to my Ph.D. supervisor, Professor Susan Fitzmaurice, from the University of Sheffield, UK, for her invaluable comments and proofreading from the first draft. I also appreciate all the participants in this study who generously provided the data. Any errors in the paper are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Wuhan Zhu completed his Ph.D. degree in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2012. He is currently an associate professor in the School of English Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University. His research interests include pragmatics, applied linguistics and cross-cultural communication. He has published 13 papers in Chinese and international academic journals such as the RELC, Asian EFL and British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science.

Notes

1. This paper focused on a meta-linguistic evaluation (Watts, 2003) by researchers which is based on the linguistic performance within discourse communities. However, there is no guarantee that the level of relational work that the researchers evaluate precisely corresponds to the recipients’ perception.

2. In Section 4, on various occasions some marked uses of particular rapport-management strategies are argued to be open to a polite interpretation. Nevertheless, we are aware that these uses might be perceived negatively as over-polite by some recipients personally. However, this paper is mainly focused on the evaluation of the general tendency of rapport-management strategies within discourse communities.

3. We acknowledge that these moves that mainly perform a referential function can sometimes serve persuasive goals depending on the intention of the email composers. Due to the limited space of the article, they are not focused in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science, China [grant number 15NDJC241YB] and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2015M581649].