How to ask a professor: Politeness in Czech academic culture

Book excerpt: The publication addresses politeness strategies used by Czech University students when they contact faculties. Politeness in Czech society is also introduced: diglossia (contexts in which both, Standard and Common Czech tend to be used), nominal and pronominal addressing in the Czech society and in the Czech academic sphere, prototypical requests in Czech and their comparison to English and other languages. The book consists of two studies focusing on students’ communication with faculties; the data include e-mail requests for information sent to the lecturer by students and requests for information posted on the students’ information forum. The focus was on expressing politeness in the form of an address, opening and closing formulas, degrees of directness and amounts of syntactic, lexical/phrasal and external modification used in requests for information.