Narrate, Direct, Commit, Express and Declare Acts in the Official Communication at the Workplace: A Case Study

Abstract

The best medium for professional communication in workplaces is email writing. However, it requires intercultural awareness and pragmatic knowledge. Previous empirical studies in Pakistan have focused on public discourse of leaders, online communication on social media and lack of training and grammatical errors in email writing. The present study fills the gap by examining the illocutionary acts and perlocution outcomes of the official emails in the workplace. For this purpose, A qualitative case study has been undertaken using purposive and convenience sampling. The data has been analyzed using Searle’s (1969) give categories for descriptive analysis. The findings of the study showed that the employees wrote different assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declarative emails. Furthermore, the informative emails performed direct and indirect actions. Similarly, the emails had multiple actions to be performed within a single email. The Congratulating emails showed that mutual congratulations were expressively ordered and achieved by the perlocution outcome. In the same manner, directive email had different orders which were explicitly achieved by the perlocution acts by the addressee.