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

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.