Dear Sir/Madam : a study of politeness, formality and directness in Singaporean business emails

• Main Author: Tan, Vel Wen Hui
• Other Authors: Randy John LaPolla
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/78392
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Request emails are believed to be crucial in facilitating business functions and have been the key type of emails studied by researchers as a result. While there have been studies on request emails from people of different nationalities, there has been no particular study analysing request emails from Singaporeans. This study analysed request emails from 22 Singaporean working adults across three different power levels on their levels of politeness, formality and directness, to identify possible patterns within their emails and understand more about factors that they consider when writing emails. It has found that while certain results fit into what has been found in emails written by other nationalities, such as how the number of high and low-level imposition requests found in emails can be affected by the power level of recipients, there are other patterns found in Singaporean emails that do not align with patterns found in emails by other nationalities. There is a need to delve deeper into factors that influence the choices Singaporeans make in writing emails so as to have a broader view of the patterns found, as reasons that were not considered in other literature were significantly cited in the survey ran by this study.