'Please answer me as soon as possible - Pragmatic failure in Essay

'Please answer me as soon as possible - Pragmatic failure in non-native speakers' email request to faculty' - Critical analysis - Essay Example nomidou-Kogetsidis states that such aspects of e-mail message as directness, the lack of greetings, and improper usage of titles and names are all aspects of an e-mail which convey to the recipient the perception of impoliteness. Imperatives are especially tricky in this regard, as the recipients invariably see imperatives, without modifiers, to be rude, even when accompanied with the word â€Å"please.† The way to modify imperatives, however, are to acknowledge the burden on the professors’ time. Such an example of this would be to say, instead of, â€Å"please give me the notes for the class I missed,† to say â€Å"if it is not a bother, and not too time-consuming, could you please send me the notes for the class that I missed.† Moreover, students used grounders most often as a way of modifying the message, and grounders are reasons why a student has to make the request (â€Å"I need notes for Thursday, as I had to take my sick grandmother to the hospit al that day†). Although Economidou-Kogetsidis states that there are alternative explanations for the students’ overall directness in composing the e-mails and lack of greetings, including the fact that Greek is different from English, that is most likely a function of young people to be direct and brief, and that the students are using avoidance strategies, Economidou-Kogetsidis states that the students should still learn the proper modes of e-mail communication to avoid pragmatic failure in the future. This piece of research fits into the larger research context in that it deals with pragmatics, and the field of pragmatics is the rubric under which this research falls. In particular, the study of pragmatics is the study of how a linguistic content of a statement and the context of its enunciation affect reasoners inferences and interpretation of what is said (Oaksford & Chater, 2010, p.. 233). A person may make pragmatic inferences based on lexical inferences, and lexical inferences are â€Å"the process by