Investigating the Linguistic Features of the E-mailing Discourse Axe Choisis : Axe 01 : Description Linguistique et analyse des discours spécialisés

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the linguistic features of the E-mailing discourse, being a part of a wider discourse, the electronic discourse. It is a specialized discourse that disposes certain characteristics that guarantees its distinctiveness from other types of Englishes such as political English, legal English and Medical English. These differences are shown on different linguistic levels: typographical level, lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level. A Corpus analysis of a number of 200 e-mail messages from the routine communication in work context of a private import-export company in El Oued, working as a franchisee for important international franchisors, is conducted: 100 outgoing e-mails composed by the first participant, the owner of the company and 100 incoming e-mails written by the representatives of foreign companies ( Indian Cs, Turkish Cs and a UAE C). A qualitative, descriptive and critical corpus analysis is followed based on linguistic criteria. The findings reveal that the company’s e-mail language is characterized mainly by a linguistic economy in the form of chatting abbreviations, acronyms, structural reductions, ellipsis, clippings and orthographic reduction; a linguistic innovation in the form of creative use of capitalization, spelling and punctuation to convey effects of gesture and tone as well as oral features and informality in the form of informal greetings and leave-takings. Results of the analysis are used to suggest recommendations to signal the importance of pedagogy in instructing students to use CMC properly without feeling the fear from the new technology. Students must be instructed both the well constructed texts used in academic settings as well as the specific texts used for personal interactions. E-mailing for academic and occupational purposes is different from e-mailing for maintaining social relations