To browse Academia. Abstract Electronic mails have nowadays become the most usual support to exchange information in professional and academic environments. A lot of research on this topic to date has focused on the linguistic characteristics of electronic communication and on the formal and informal features and the orality involved in this form of communication. Most of the studies have referred to group-based asynchronous communication.
But email is today a new communication exchange medium in social, professional and academic settings, frequently used as a substitute for the traditional formal letter. The oral characterizations and linguistic formality involved in this use of emails are still in need of research. This article explores the formal and informal features in emails based on a corpus of messages exchanged by academic institutions and studies the similarities and differences on the basis of their mode of communication one-to-one or one-to-many and the sender's mother tongue native or non-native.
The language samples collected were systematically analyzed for formality of greetings and farewells, use of contractions, politeness indicators and non-standard linguistic features. The findings provide new insights into traits of orality and formality in email communication and demonstrate the emergence of a new style in writing for even the most important, confidential and formal purposes which seems to be creating to form a new sub-genre of letter-writing. Keywords: CMC, asynchronous communication, formality, informality, email style".
This paper presents the results of a corpus-based study which investigates the genre of academic email and more specifically its pragmatic dimension. Four conversational routines thank yous, apologies, requests, offers are analysed and compared in two channels: academic e-mails and conventional print letters.
In addition, data from both native and non-native speakers of English is considered, which sheds light on some of the differences found in the academic e-mail writing of learners of English.
