Cortesia nella corrispondenza elettronica nell’ambito accademico. Un confronto tra le lingue italiana e polacca
Politeness in electronic correspondence in academic environment. A comparison between Italian and Polish

Summary/Abstract: In the era of the Internet, and even more so due to the global emergency situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic, communication between students and university professors has been dominated by electronic mail. Academic e-mails tend to oscillate between two extremes: absolute formality on one side and a language very close to informal speech on the other. The present study compares electronic correspondence in Italian and Polish in order to individuate the most characteristic forms for each language and to establish their degree of politeness. When assessing the degree of (im)politeness, both negative and positive politeness strategies (Brown & Levinson) are taken into account. The data was collected in on-line questionnaires distributed among Polish and Italian university students. The analysis examines opening and closing phrases, signatures as well as examples of requests made by students in different possible scenarios. On average, Polish appear to be much more polite in opening and closing greetings, but in the main body of an e-mail they often use more direct forms. In Italian, typically spoken greetings such as Buongiorno (Good morning) are more frequent, but requests apply numerous negative politeness strategies. Although some principles of politeness are present in both languages, politeness remains a culture-specific phenomenon.

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