Linguistic regulation in institutional emails: conflicts among university professors in the virtual institutional environment

Abstract

We investigate metalinguistic reflexions carried out by university professors when they focus on order notions or linguistic regulations in the virtual interaction environment, in a public university. In a sociopragmatic approach, the virtual environment is characterized as a texture of social voices which signal the participants’ position in the institutional space they are inserted. Analyzed data show public servants appropriating of technological artifacts to interact in a new space: the virtual professional environment. The exchange of electronic messages seems to be influenced by other interactions mediated by digital artifacts characteristic of non professional virtual environment. In this new environment such interactions seem to substitute the solid professional relationships characteristic of face-to-face interactions, minimizing the fear of focusing polemic issues towards conventional interlocutions such as the professional competence of peers oriented by the formal writing linguistic conventions, in electronic messages, exchanged in virtual institutional environment.