| Communication etiquette may be considered in face-to-face communications,and generally a polite person talking with positive image is more welcomed than people with impolite behavior.At the same time,online communication tends to be a trend in modern life,and focusing on linguistics in online communication especially online etiquette becomes an urgent issue,because it involves some social factors which may affect communicators’ utterance and behavior.Based on Politeness Principle of Geoffrey Leech(1983)and Brown & Levison’s(1987)politeness theory of Face-threatening Acts,this paper analyzed 180 English e-mails collected by faculty,staff and students from three Confucius Institutes in the UK in 11 months.Combining quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis,in this study,descriptive analysis and regression analysis were used to analyze emails of different topics from varied interlocutors.Quantitative research was adopted to analyze linguistic features of opening salutations and closing valedictions of English e-mails.The influence of social pragmatic factors on linguistic features of these(im)politeness phenomena was analyzed and the reasons for these phenomena were explained.It came to the conclusion that social pragmatic factors such as the topic of English email,social identity of senders and recipients,social distance between the communicators may affect(im)politeness in British educational institutions.In general,emails about inquiry and request were more likely to abide by the politeness principle to avoid addressees’ positive face-threatening acts;while emails about providing information as well emails about responding to requests were more likely to violate the politeness principle and threaten the positive face of the addresser.The result of this study suggested that to achieve successful interpersonal email communication,some socio-pragmatic factors must be taken into consideration while writing emails to British institutions. |
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