A study of linguistic mitigation, writer empathy and recipient personality in requesting and bringing bad news via email

IF 1.8 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-02-04 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2025.01.010

Nicolas Ruytenbeek , Thomas Holtgraves

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

To this day, the extent to which inter-individual variables such as empathy and personality shape the realization of face-threatening speech acts remains poorly known. This research seeks to fill this gap by addressing the influence of participant empathy and recipient personality on the use of linguistic mitigation strategies, focusing on email requests and bad news in a professional context in French. The present study is in line with the new orientation in experimental pragmatic research, as it foregrounds individual variability in the assessment of and the linguistic responses to socio-contextual variables. Using an empathy quotient (EQ) questionnaire, we recruited a number of 200 participants with French as mother tongue and aged 23–50. The 40 most rigid and 40 most flexible respondents were selected for a production task in which they wrote a request email and an email bringing bad news either to a flexible or rigid recipient (2x2 design). Our analyses show that more empathic participants use more linguistic mitigation compared to less empathic participants; apologies, for instance, were more often present both in their request and bad news professional emails. We discuss these findings in the light of recent work on the role of empathy and personality in communicative behaviour.

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.