Address in the discursive genre of email: nominal forms of treatment in the openings and closings of email messages

Abstract

From a corpus of e-mails exchanged by Spanish speakers in Spain, in this work we deal with forms of address, in particular of the nominal forms of address in vocative function, through the analysis of two of its fundamental values: the deictic and the relational. We will focus mainly on the analysis of the functions of the nominal treatment formulas in the openings and closings of the emails. Our objective is to identify some discursive patterns of e-mail that legitimize us to characterize it as an independent discursive genre (Swales, 1990). In e-mail, the nominal values of nominal address forms are developed within an enunciation framework defined by the paratext itself, which explains the references to the sender and recipient, and in some of the openings and closures of the messages. Furthermore, the study of the social-affective relational values of the nominal forms of address is related to the analysis of the more or less formulaic use of address forms. In summary, based on the analysis of address in the electronic mail, this work addresses issues that put us in front of central themes in the characterization of the electronic style and the digital discourse, according to its particular positioning in relation to the opposition between power and solidarity (Brown and Gilman, 1960) and autonomy and affiliation (Bravo, 1999).