Formality and informality in electronic communication

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 the increasing use of e-mails today, even for the most important, confidential and formal purposes is tending to form a new sub-genre of letter-writing. This paper studies the formulae of etiquette and protocol used in e-mails for salutation, opening, pre-closing and closing, and other elements related to formality and provides new insights on these features. Our research is based on the analysis of a corpus of formal and informal messages in an academic environment.