Macrostructure of request emails in the academic field. Contrastive Spanish-Italian analysis

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify the macrostructural characteristics in request emails of university students in order to determine the analogies and divergences in written interaction in the Spanish and Italian academic fields. For this purpose, empirical data of a qualitative and exploratory study are provided that analyze a corpus of emails of Spanish and Italian university students in which the informants make requests to their teachers. The results show that the emails analyzed have an analogous disposition in which practically all the main sections of the macrostructural model used for the analysis are respected. However, there are some variations in the movements and submovements that reflect variations in the degree of social distance in the relations of hierarchical asymmetry between the two countries and the cultural differences in the level of formality in the language that register in both academic context