“On for Drinkies?”: Email Cues of Participant Alignments

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which participants locally construct and make sense of the positions, stances, or alignments towards their addressees in a corpus of private email messages in Greek and in English. In particular, it argues that the main linguistic strategies for contextually cueing participant relations involve various types of code-alternations (Greek-English code-switches, style shifts, intertextual references, etc). These code-alternations can be brought together by their ability to introduce into the text incongruous associations among elements from different varieties and contexts. In terms of social actions, they establish footings of symmetrical alignments encompassing the acts of indexing, enhancing, and maintaining intimate relations. These patterns of use are argued to be shaped by two communicative context features of email: the lack of the addressers’ and addressees’ physical co-presence and the asynchronicity of communication, both implicating a heavy reliance on code-centered choices for interactional and identity work.