Linguistic Features of Digital Etiquette in an Academic Environment

The purpose of this article is to analyze the lexical, syntactic, and punctuation features of polite address used by university students in emails to their professors. The material for the analysis was the authors' personal correspondence, comprising 660 letters sent by students from different faculties of the university in 2020–2023. The need to study a form of computer-mediated communication that became widespread in the 2020s following the introduction of distance learning during the pandemic and continues to develop actively, determines the relevance of the work. The article considers the linguistic features of traditional polite greeting and farewell formulas and their “digital” analogues used by addressees in email correspondence between students and a teacher. Based on vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation, the authors identify changes that etiquette formulas have undergone in comparison with the accepted “pre-digital” norm. It is noted that linguistic transformations in digital etiquette are driven, on the one hand, by the specifics of teacher-student interaction in the educational process and, on the other hand, by the very format of electronic business correspondence. It is noted that linguistic transformations in digital etiquette are driven, on the one hand, by the specifics of teacher-student interaction in the educational process and, on the other hand, by the very format of electronic business correspondence. The analysis of etiquette formulas used by students is carried out taking into account their communicative function and allows for  recommendations in the development of rules for digital communication culture.