Linguistic Interpretations of Pakistani Job Application Letters

Abstract

This study strives to sift through the job application letters written by the Pakistani applicants in order to seek linguistic interpretations on different levels. The analysis of these job letters was made keeping in view two major objectives: (i) to explore the level of vividness/vagueness in the letters; and (ii) to highlight politeness strategies demonstrated through these letters. To accomplish the first objective a micro level analysis was furnished on word level. In this context lexical items like proper and common nouns, syntactic patterns like active and passive voice, cohesive devices like referencing and transitional words, rhetorical devices like repetition and parallelism etc. had been studied both quantitatively (to determine the level of concreteness and abstractness in the letters) and qualitatively (to determine what implications are made by this concreteness and abstractness). To achieve the second objective a macro level analysis was made on sentence level to determine positive (directness and optimism); and negative (indirectness, use of modals, expressing appreciation and formulaic expressions) strategies. The findings reveal that the Pakistani applicants have tendency to use more vague expressions than the concrete ones. The study further exhibits that the applicants of the study utilize both the positive and negative politeness strategies in their applications.

Keywords: Job application letters, linguistic interpretations, vividness, vagueness, negative politeness, positive politeness