“Multiple Identities” and the Development of Pragmatic Competence Exhibited in Workplace Environments

There is no denying that new styles of communication have already made great advances in both academic and workplace environments. As Chester (2002) believes, there are now different communication needs whose hierarchy has also changed. The efficiency, frequency and quality of communication are determined by many important variables – people’s (multiple) identities and age, or one’s first language being cases in point. These new styles of communication may be considered surprising, linguistically inaccurate, or even rude. Many of them do also not comply to ones that would be created by native speakers, as the people who use them more often than not produce quite awkward structures – on the one hand this is an example of pure corporate jargon and ESP (in the workplace context), on the other a unique discourse heavily manifesting its own identity, first language and norms of politeness present in a particular community (Paltridge 2012). Thus the discourse produced (already creating a new style of communication) violates pragmatic norms obvious to native speakers, as well as being highly surprising (if not even confusing) to other non-native speakers. The proposed article aims to demonstrate the results of the analysis of corporate emails produced by various non-native advanced speakers of English. The analysis mainly focuses on corpus utterances demonstrating a lack of pragmatic competence, as well as the existence of “multiple identities” of their authors