Prof. Rachele De Felice, School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, The Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University (UK)
Chair: Prof. Annalisa Zanola, University of Brescia
When: Monday, May 8th, 2023, 11:15 AM
Where: Room A1, S. Chiara Building
The main function of workplace or business email is generally recognised to be transactional, that is to say, task-oriented: people write to each other to ask or provide information, or make requests and suggestions with regard to specific situations. However, these messages often also contain some more personal utterances, from generic good wishes ('I hope you had a good Christmas') to more individual comments ('I'm sorry to hear you had a bad trip' or 'I'm feeling demoralised about this result'). In this presentation, prof. De Felice will discuss the range of expressive utterances found in large workplace email datasets such as the Enron Corpus and the Clinton Email Corpus, looking at the functions they embody as well as their potential effects on the interpersonal relationships between their senders and recipients.