礼貌规则在商务英语信件中应用探讨,商务英语论文

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 The Background of the Study
Geoffrey Leech (1983), a renowned linguist at the University of Lancaster,maintained that, in addition to cooperation, there must be something else thatcommunicators all value and follow in conversations. After careful analysis he came to theconclusion that politeness plays a vital role there to help people to carry on a conversationsmoothly. Therefore, his ideas came into being with the Politeness Principle (PP).Leech discussed six maxims in PP, which are the maxim of tact, the maxim ofgenerosity, the maxim of approbation, the maxim of modesty, the maxim of agreement,and the maxim of sympathy. It is commonly believed that politeness principle is also animportant perspective in discourse analysis (Kasper, 1990). Previous studies of PP areusually focused on conversations, but my study is a case study on written texts, of whichEnglish business letters are chosen as subjects, as their basic requirement of politeness isone of the principle we have to follow in our business negotiations. Since English is animportant language of trade and business, it is an indispensable skill for daily businessaffair knowing how to write English business letters with politeness principles followed. Inaddition, the writer s failure to follow the politeness principle in business letters will causehim to lose his customers, and money.

1.2 The Significance and Objectives of the Study
Politeness theory has drawn a lot of attention in the past two decades, and although itis scrutinized and criticized from different perspectives, it remains very much alive.Politeness theory and related studies, like discourse analysis, conversation analysis andstudies of interethnic communication, have chiefly been based on observations in empiricalstudies of spoken language and have mainly been focused on face-to-face interaction indaily communicative settings, and even if politeness has been studied in professionalsettings, the focus has been mainly on oral interaction (Erickson, 1982; Fiksdal, 1988;Charlotte, 1988). It is surprising that few studies (Cherry, 1988; Hagge, 1989) of politenesstheory have so far been focused on written language and language for specific purposes(LSP). On the basis of the previous studies, I found that it is necessary to conduct aresearch on the relationship between politeness theory and professional settings shown inwritten discourse. Business letters, a formal communicative means, need high standards ofpoliteness to help their writers realize their aims. In addition, the studies on linguistic politeness have seldom been based on corpus data,and they have been conducted with the importance and complexity of non-linguisticcontext largely ignored. The politeness principle has often been discussed based oninvented utterances in a social vacuum. However, in my thesis, I have collected manyauthentic business letters that have served their purposes in reality, andtry to find out howpoliteness theory was applied in written discourse.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 English Business Letters
Letter writing is similar to other forms of creative writing. It involves a goodcommand of English, which is one of the basic requirements of good business letters. Theletters should be free of grammatical errors, and also free of vagueness or ambiguity. Gan(2003) thinks that certain essential qualities are specific to business letters. They are clarityand courtesy. Yan (1998) also listed completeness, conciseness, clarity and courtesy asfundamental features of business letters. They both emphasized the important element ofcourtesy in business letters. The reason for courtesy is that we should always keep in mindthe person that we are addressing to. We ought to view things on his behalf, understandproblems and difficulties from his perspective and express our ideas in the language heknows. Therefore, we need to have politeness principle to guide us. We hope to be ableto employ different politeness strategies in business letters. Business letters can be classified in different ways. According to their functions,Huang (2002) put them into ten categories: Inquiry letters, offer letters, confirmation letters,notification letters, approval letters, collection letters, sales letters, refusal letters, claimsand adjustments letters and some special letters. His classification is based on the functionsof the letters. I try to put them into different categories according to the speech acts theyperform in light of the Speech Act Theory.

2.2 Politeness Principle (PP)
The party on behalf of universality viewpoint assumes that although politeness can bepresented differently in different cultures, the fundamental nature of it is the same, and thusthe role it plays across cultures is universal.The group that studies politeness from the culture-specific perspective (Schiffrin 1994;Wierzbicka 1985 and Gu Yueguo 1990) has re-examined these kinds of universalhypotheses and questioned their universality. They assume that conceptualization ofpoliteness differs among cultures. The party representing culture-specific perspectivesuggests that Anglo-American politeness rules such as those proposed by Lakoff, Leechand Brown & Levinson etc cannot be universally applied in explaining cross-culturalpoliteness, especially not compliant with Oriental cultures (Gu 1990).For instance, “in Lakoff's viewpoint, imposition is not a symbol of politeness, whilein Chinese context imposition can be polite in the case of invitation” (Gu 1990:251)For example, a prospective mother-in-law (hence M) invites a prospective son-in-law(hence S) to dinner with M's family. In such a case, an ideal performance ofinviting-accepting /refusing usually takes place within a single round of talk exchanges inthe West. However, in Chinese culture, the performance of invitation triggers three roundsof talk exchanges in that M tries to minimize cost to herself to show attitudinal warmth bycomplying with the generosity maxim while S makes tactful declining by giving hisobservance of M's generosity. Gu (1990) uses a general pattern to explain the number oftalk exchanges completing a successful inviting transaction.

Chapter Three The Design of My Study ............ 19

3.1 Research questions ............................ 19

3.2 Hypotheses ...................... 19

3.3 Subjects .................. 19

3.4 Procedure........ 21

Chapter Four Results and Discussion ................... 27

4.1 Respective percentages of positive and negative politeness............... 27

4.2 A combination of both strategies................. 29

Chapter Five Conclusion.................. 31

5.1 Conclusion......................... 31

Chapter Four Results and Discussion

4.1 Respective percentages of positive and negative politeness
I have taken at random 132 business letters for samples from different books forstudy. I counted the two types of politeness strategies in all the letters and calculate therespective percentage of each politeness strategy at the level of sentence. Lets take Sample3 for example.There are 5 sentences in all in the letter. Of them S1 and S2 contain positivepoliteness strategies while S3, S4 and S5 contain negative politeness strategies. It is clearthat positive politeness strategies account for 40 percent, and the negative politenessstrategies amount to 60 percent. The respective politeness strategy proportion may varywith the progression of business transaction, which is shown in Table 4.1 The table indicates see that there is a relatively small gap between the distribution ofpositive (57 percent) and negative (43 percent) strategies in letters aimed at “makingcontact”. For negotiation the percentage of negative strategy (62 percent) slightly riseswhile that for positive strategy falls (38 percent) compared with those for making contact.In “in conflict” letters, negative politeness amounts to seventy two percent (72 percent) ofthe total. The percentage of positive strategy is much smaller (28 percent).We come to realize, at early stages of business transactions, positive politenessstrategies are more frequently used to establish a good relationship. Therefore positivestrategy is regarded as an instrument tool. However, once the relationship has beenestablished, and the two parties have been bound by their mutual rights and obligations,positive strategy is losing its glamour. Then with the business relationship going on, negative politeness is of greater importance. When there is a conflict in their businesstransaction, negative politeness surpasses positive politeness.In letters for “Making Contact”, positive politeness strategies are as frequently usedas if not more frequently than negative strategies on the whole. At the early stage ofbusiness transactions, positive politeness strategies are used to strike up a friendlyrelationship by showing solidarity. The distance between the two parties are likely to benarrowed, as is done in sales letters. For example, in a sales letter, I find the statements: “Ihear that your company is of great strength in international trade. We are looking forwardto cooperation between us in this line very soon.” It is obvious that the letter begins with acompliment follows it with a good wish for cooperation. It is also clear that positivepoliteness has been widely employed not only in sales letters but in enquiry letters as well.Enquiry letters are important sources of information for merchants, and they are chieflyused to get information about the commodity or service they are interested in.

4.2 A combination of both strategies
From the business letters collected for my study, I found that two strategiesare sometimes integrated into one sentence. In the 9 quotation letters in thepresent paper, the opening section is most frequently characterized by the use of positivepoliteness and the strategy is usually verbal and aimed at “claiming common ground” byappreciating the enquiry of the sender. The positive strategy thus signaled thewriter s readiness to establish a business relationship. However, the number of verbalstrategies for mitigating the threat to face in a quotation is small in contrast, for quotationsare conventionally associated with only moderate imposition. The most frequently usednegative politeness strategies in quotations usually occur in the last part of thepropositional section and is characterized by the effort to dissociate the receiver from theface-threatening act by using impersonal verbs, nominalizations, passive voices,conditional clauses, etc. In the samples I drew from the quotations, the receiver is usuallygiven the freedom of action with the sender using conditionals as an indicator.Conditionals are almost always good markers of conventional politeness. From analysis of such examples, we firstly find that the type of letters is closelycorrelated with the choice of politeness strategies. In my thesis business letters areclassified to show the three stages of business transactions. The choice of politenessstrategies in each stage can clearly indicate the relative power of each party in theirtransactions.Besides, we have to admit that there is not a clear-cut dividing line between theapplication of positive politeness and negative politeness strategy, for the combination ofthe two strategies is unavoidable. However, my study can help us see the general pictureand find out the pattern of politeness in business letters. My finding in the survey can be ofsome help to the writers of business letters.
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Chapter Five Conclusion

The application of positive and negative politeness correlates closely with the types ofbusiness letters, which can indicate the progression of business transaction. Forexample, positive strategies are used slightly more frequently at early stages of thetransactions than negative strategies, but when negotiation starts, negative strategiesprevail. What are the possible reasons? Firstly, the more contact the two parties have had,the smaller the social and mental distance is, and thus the need for positive politeness as a“social accelerator” gives way to bonds of mutual rights and obligations as soon as acontract has been reached . If the power relationship becomes clear with the transactionprogressing, the need for positive politeness is declining. Negative politeness is prevailing.Secondly, as soon as the two parties have been intimate enough, brevity and clarity ishighly valued in business letters. One of the four maxims in Gricean Principle becomesprominent, namely the maxim of manner. Positive politeness is giving way to negativepoliteness with the progressing of the business transaction. The length of the opening andclosing parts of the letter drops dramatically when negotiations and conflict are going on.Longer opening is needed for making contact, but not for negotiation and conflict.In addition, the ratio of negative politeness to positive politeness is also related towhether the said party is the seller or the buyer. The seller is more likely to use positivepoliteness than the buyer, especially in the first category of business letters. It is provedthat the buyer has greater power, which is in agreement with the statement that thecustomer is God.
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