Analysis of High/Low Status Emails

Most people who sit down to write an email to their best friend use different greetings, words, and sentence structure than those writing an email to a potential employer. As this week's assignment confirmed, people alter their language use depending on the status of the person they are writing to. Our group compiled 20 emails addressed to high status members, and 20 emails addressed to low status members. These emails were then analyzed for parts of speech, and semantics. Listed below are some of our key findings, and our interpretation of this data.

According to Aoki & Woodruff (2008), "many communicative acts have implications for the status of a relationship." After analyzing our data, we feel that our findings support this statement.

NNB - It is likely that we used more titles in the high status category because email is more formal when writing to someone of higher authority. There were no examples of using titles in our low status sample. This could be because when writing to someone of less authority, the email tends to be more informal.

CCB - There were seven instances of the word "but" in the high status e-mails, but no instances in the low status e-mails. We are not sure why exactly this is, but we noticed that in the context of the high status emails, "but" was used as a form of justification. For example, when writing to a professor, students may write, "I know you said this, but..." When speaking to a member of a low status group, we may not feel the need to justify our thoughts and opinions.

PPY - The majority of the instances where "you" was used was in the phrase "thank you" or "thank you for your __". This is probably because people tend to use more polite language when writing to someone of higher status. When "you" was used in low status emails, it was more common to address the receiver as "you."

IW - The low status emails in our sample used the phrase "with" more than the high status emails. This may be because the instances of "with" referred to teamwork and collaboration. People of higher status may be more likely to supervise rather than work on the same level, so there would not be as much of a need for coordination to meet.

P1 - A lot of the high status emails are about education because they were sent to professors. Among those that weren't sent to professors, many of them discussed education as a conflict. For example, an email to a prospective employer included a class schedule. We were surprised that education was not more common in low status emails, as this is a common thread among the majority of our contacts.

A7+ - Our data shows that emails addressed to high status individuals used "likely" four times as often as low status emails. Based on our data, it seems students used this to ask a high status member if a specific task would be possible, or if they would be likely to complete said task in a particular time frame. Low status emails do not shows this thread, as the questions and requests are more direct.

T1.3 - Many emails addressed to high status individuals contain time periods because they are referencing when an assignment will be completed, or when they are free to work. Time periods are often associated with deadlines and assignments, which may be why time was mentioned five times more in the high status category. In terms of low status time references, time may be important when deciding when to have a meeting or eat lunch with friends.

N5- - Very few little quantities were used in this data set, but they really didn't follow a pattern. There were 4 instances in the low status group, and 0 instances in the high status group. The instances in the low status group used phrases such as "none" and "little". In these contexts, the words were used to further explain something; usually a problem.

A14 - Exclusivizers and particulizers were not used very often in this group of data, but they were more common in high status emails. We are not sure why this is true, but we hypothesize that students writing emails to high status individuals may be more likely to use these words to better describe or clarify their main point to avoid confusion.

Coding Scheme for Euphemisms

McGlone and Batchelor define euphemisms as a linguistic tool employed out of the reluctance “to utter more semantically transparent terms for certain unsettling topics”. In other words, a euphemism is an expression that refers to something in a more polite way instead of its literal name. Common usage of euphemism occurs with sex, pregnancy, profanity, bodily discharge, etc.

The following instructions must be abided in order for the coding of euphemisms to be successful.

• Details about the e-mails are to be ignored. This includes the sender’s address, the recipient’s address, the blind/carbon copy recipient’s address(es), the timestamp, and the subject.
• The salutation and the closing portions of the email must be disregarded.
• Except for e-mail details, salutations, and closings, each sentence in the body of the email is to be considered for euphemism.
• The sentence to be considered must be in English.
• If a sentence does not contain a euphemism, it is to be coded with the number 0.
• If a sentence does contain a euphemism, it is to be coded with the number 1.
• Every sentence must be coded as a euphemism with 0 or not a euphemism with 1.
• Each sentence must be coded once.

Once our team coded the e-mails, a reliability percentage of 91.4% was calculated.

A few examples of agreed euphemisms are listed below.

• so we're of age already.
• Work some team lead magic.
• haha he's smokin' here

Several examples of disagreed euphemisms are listed below.

• So success or epic fail?
• If we can leave them at home, I can anticipate several fewer moans and groans tomorrow at the beginning of class
• Do you know how else I would go about this?
• Thank you for your time.
• just give a text/voicemail/email so I have a heads up.
• My blank check awaits.
• AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!!!!!ELEVEN!!!
• Just a really minute detail