An Exploratory Sociolinguistic Study of Key Areas for Politeness Work in Saudi Academic Emails

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and analyse the key areas in which politeness work is going on in email correspondence between Saudi Arabian students and lecturers. The importance of this study lies in its role in understanding social and professional (i.e., academic) interactions through the politeness strategies employed in Saudi emails and by exploring similarities and differences in their use between women and men, as well as between lecturers and students. In this study, both first and second-order (see Section 2.7) politeness approaches were integrated to analyse particular politeness phenomena, taking into consideration participants' perspective. This study explored 140 emails that were gathered from 20 Saudi participants in Saudi universities, and eight participants were interviewed. This study has drawn on Brown and Levinson's (1978) seminal work on politeness in analysing quantitative data as well as on other relevant frameworks (e.g., Wong, 2010). Many features found in previous studies were also found in the current study; some aspects were particular to the Saudi context. Some patterns of choice appeared to have a relationship as to whether the writer/receiver of an email is a woman or a man, and/or is a lecturer or a student, and that there is a relationship between the choice of politeness strategy and identity construction. The results showed that there seems to be no clear cut boundary between the politeness classifications as implied in Brown and Levinson. The results also showed that the rapport potential varied for the different politeness devices, and that a single item might convey different things. The current data indicated that it is not possible to interpret rapport or politeness strategies from a single linguistic form, without taking content and context into consideration, and that perceptions and practice are different components that may have a gap between them.