A polidez e a preservação de face em trocas de e-mails entre gerentes e sua relação com a cultura organizacional

Abstract

Given the increasing use of the Internet and the importance of the e-mail language in the corporate environment, this paper aims at analyzing Politeness Strategies and mechanisms to avoid or minimize face-threatening acts in exchanges of e-mails between a group of managers in a private language school in Brazil. The research is a case study and uses an interpretative approach as well as quantitative data. Hence, in this study were integrated into Pragmatics other research areas such as Systemic Functional Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. The focus on the mechanisms of politeness and face protection aims to investigate how these elements of language, used in the exchange of e-mails among the group of managers involved in the study, are reflected in the Company Culture. To this end, we used the concepts of Brown and Levinson (1987) for politeness and Goffman (1998) for framing and footing. In the area of standardized categorization of groups of words frequently found within a corpus Hyland (2008) parameters were used, those parameters are founded on the three metafunctions by Halliday. Finally, there are some considerations regarding written exchanges through e-mails within the institution, seeking to understand whether these exchanges are part of an established genre or a way of communicating with unique characteristics. The analyses performed in this research investigate ways of politeness and face protection in greetings and closures of e-mails in the study corpus, the language used in requests for help / information, resolving conflicts and other situations of everyday life of managers of the target institution. The results of the analysis of the language used in electronic messages exchanged by the group suggest a direct relationship between the Company Culture the typical and characteristic strategies for protection of face and politeness adopted in the company managers messages