Social Distancing and Politeness: Hungarian Emailing Practices During the Coronavirus Epidemic

ABSTRACT

With its outbreak and quick spread in early 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic brought rapid and sweeping changes in its wake in all walks of life. As measures were being imposed to contain the spread of the virus, emailing practices, including patterns of polite behaviour, were re-evaluated. Based on a corpus of emails comprising more than 250 texts, collected by various methods and showcasing personal, official and business correspondence alike, our paper presents linguistic features of emailing practices characterizing the first two and a half months of the global epidemic. Our pragmatic analysis uses the criteria of politeness theories to explore and classify novel emailing formulas indexically referring to the speech situation, and to interpret the functions of particular linguistic devices. The results point to the existence of a social distance-reducing strategy underlying varied patterns of expression. Social distance is offset, as it were, by linguistic means, distance being restricted to the spatial domain and solidarity taking centre stage in language activity. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.