Analysing formality and informality in the speech act of requesting in emails from the field of maritime English

Abstract

The globalization of trade and the removal of linguistic barriers led to the development of English for Business Purposes (EBP), as used in the business world and its communication processes. Email correspondence promotes the interconnectedness of society as communication happens directly and faster. Speech acts of requesting are performed to express writers’ intentions and to involve readers in an action. Written registers allow issuers and receivers to cooperate and negotiate meaning in a polite way when exchanging information. Among EBP, subareas of language study are developing, such as Maritime English, which intertwines communication among the diversity of actors involved in the shipping industry in the process of exporting and importing. It is a fact that differences in language and culture affect communication. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the degree of formality and informality varies according to the knowledge of the shipping process and the domain of the target language to avoid misunderstandings and create fluency in all maritime procedures. Formal and informal features of requests will be studied in correspondence between a Vietnamese and a Spanish company in a maritime transaction. The preliminary results of the research show that depending on the expertise of the development of trade, the command of the language, and the importance of the written statements, requests are more direct when operations are better controlled by the actors involved, and indirect when there are more doubts in those operations. Hence, to achieve the necessary business flow, it is crucial to command the situation by both senders and receivers.