Building Rapport in BELF Communication: Solidarity Strategies in Business Emails

Authors

  • Paola-Maria Caleffi Università degli studi di Verona

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13133/2239-1983/17133

Abstract

In the globalized market, business professionals use emails to communicate with customers, suppliers, and even colleagues who may be based in any part of the world, employing English as a business lingua franca (BELF). Despite the goal-oriented nature of business communication, rapport is “an essential element in the building and maintenance of strong work relations” (Pullin 2010, 456), and the achievement of business goals may be “dependent to some extent on the establishment of relations” (Pullin 2010, 458). However, nurturing interpersonal relationships may be difficult in intercultural business interactions (Spencer-Oatey and Xing 2003),especially in the case of business emailing, whose main aim is the rapid fulfillment of the task at hand. Based on a corpus of business email exchanges amongst BELF users of different L1s, this paper proposes a classification of ‘solidarity strategies’ (Köster 2006)aimed at building and nurturing rapport in email communication despite the pressure of getting the job done. It is argued that being less concerned with issues of accuracy in the target language, BELF email writers seem to pay more attention to the pragmatic needs of business communication, including that of building trust and common ground.

Author Biography

Paola-Maria Caleffi, Università degli studi di Verona

Paola-Maria Caleffi holds an MA in Linguistics, with a Master’s Thesis on the English of tweets, and a PhD in English Studies, with a Doctoral Thesis on the use and teaching of English L2 writing in Italian higher education. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Verona, where she teaches English Language and English Linguistics to BA and MA students, and has held seminars on Academic Writing and Academic Presentation Skills for PhD candidates. She also works as a freelance translator, and teaches translation at the University of Mantua. She has taught English Language and English Linguistics at the University of Padua. Her research areas of interests include (Business) English as a Lingua Franca, Sociolinguistics and Language Change, Digital Communication and ComputerMediated Discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis, English Language Teaching, Translation. 

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Published

2020-11-01

How to Cite

Caleffi, P.-M. (2020). Building Rapport in BELF Communication: Solidarity Strategies in Business Emails. Status Quaestionis, 2(19). https://doi.org/10.13133/2239-1983/17133

Issue

No. 19 (2020): An Interdisciplinary Approach to English as a Lingua Franca

Section

Articles

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