Analysis of grammatical metaphors of mood and politeness strategies in students to professor email requests

Imen Aribi

Abstract

The present study investigates the email requests written by a group of Tunisian postgraduate students in English to their professor. The lexico-grammatical choices made by requesters to enact personal/social relationship with the requestee and to realize request are examined. This research focuses on the SFL notion of interpersonal grammatical metaphor defined as “the phenomenon whereby a set of agnate forms is present in the language having different mappings between the semantic and the grammatical categories” (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999, 7). Instances of interpersonal grammatical metaphors (GM) of mood are detected according to Halliday’s (1994) model. The study also examines the politeness strategies used by the writers of these emails from a pragmatic perspective following Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework. Results reveal that the participants resort to the use of GM of mood to show more politeness to reach certain communicative purposes. Results also show that the participants use both direct and indirect politeness strategies in their email requests but tend to be more indirect using positive and negative politeness strategies. The reason behind such inclination is to show their respect and deference to the emails’ recipient who has social power.