Valeriy A. Efremov

Associate Professor, Doctor of Science (Philology), Professor, Head of the Department of the Russian Language

Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia

(Saint-Petersburg, Russia)

Yulia S. Andreeva

Еxecutive Director of the Center for Plain Language, Head of the group of the Center for Implementation of a Client-Centric Approach, Institute Higher School of Public Administration

Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

(Moscow, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-1-145-155

Abstract. The article continues a series of works by the authors promoting the concept of plain language as a special form of language for interaction between the government and citizens, designed to harmonize communication and reduce social tension. The main task of communication between the authorities and citizens is to help people solve their problems, relying on legislation and complying with all necessary requirements. This study analyzes the problem areas of such an important parameter of official business communication as the addressee factor, structurally verbalized primarily by various phatic means. The basic syntactic and etiquette unit explicated the addressee factor is the address. Analysis of a large corpus of responses from civil servants to citizens of the Russian Federation, as well as information messages from official structures in the form of various announcements, allows us to identify such potentially agonistic zones of official communication as replacing an address with a greeting, depersonalization, unreasonable repetition of an address, and much more. The work also describes such types of violation of the implementation of the addressee factor as mixing the You- and you-registers, incorrect use of addresses when using new communication technologies, unsuccessful signatures of the authors (performers) of the answers. At the end of the article, the authors give examples of actual, recently emerged trends in written communication of state organizations and citizens, directly related to the implementation of the addressee factor. Some of them are positive (the use of we-inclusive in official communications), some are ambivalent (the abolition of appeals).
Keywords: plain language, addressee factor, official business correspondence, epistolary etiquette, address.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Efremov, VA & Andreeva, YuS 2024, ‘Plain Language: the Addressee Factor’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 1 (17), pp. 145–155, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2024-1-145-155 (in Russ.)

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