La codifica pragmalinguistica dell'atto di richiesta nelle e-mail degli studenti universitari italiani

The present study analyzes the pragma-linguistic coding of requests in e-mails sent by Italian university students to their teachers. The study is based on a corpus of 315 emails from which 246 e-mails containing requests were selected. The study aims to investigate which are the main strategies for formulating requests, which perspectives are used and how requests are modified both internally and externally. Despite the asymmetric and formal relationshipbe-tween the interlocutors, the data that have been collected show that direct strategies are used more frequently than indirect ones. For mitigating the request in order to prevent possible conflicts due to the directive nature of requests, Italian students appear to prefer external mod-ifiers to internal modifiers, such as lexical or morphosyntactic modifiers