A Goal-oriented Approach To The Analysis Of Language In Business Correspondence

A Goal-oriented Approach to the Analysis of Language in Business CorrespondenceAbstractThe end of the Second World War heralded an age of enormous expansion of economic activity on an international scale. English business correspondence became a dispensable part of business transactions. From the early 1970s, linguists have become increasingly interested in the language issue in business writings. Pragmaticians, stylisticians and discourse analysts have investigated the linguistic features of business letters from their respective perspectives. They bear the knowledge of, and are familiar with the formal structure and the techniques of linguistic analysis. The research lays emphasis on the relationship of the content and the form whereas neglecting the study of the communicative functions and the analysis of the goals of language in business letters. Thus it is either superficial or lopsided and cannot theoretically and systematically explain the particular choice of language in business writing. And there is also no inter-disciplinary study till now as to this aspect. Based on the predecessors at home and abroad, this thesis attempts to look intothe language in business correspondence with a new method------a goal-oriented approach, with itsfocus on the pragmatic aspects.Language is a tool for communication. All language communications are goal-oriented, in the course of which various types of goal interact. The speaker (or the writer), in order to achieve his ultimate goal, has the task of "encoding" both the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in the locutionary act. The hearer (or the reader) has to work out, from the locutionary act, the illocution and perlocution. Therefore, communication is problem-solving which can be reconciled with the problem-solving study employed in the Artificial Intelligence. This viewpoint demands that we adapt the ideas of Grice and Leech somewhat freely. That is: these maxims or principles can be capable of being violated without the abnegation of the kind of activity in which the interlocutor engages; they can be observed or contravened to varying degrees. One principle or maxim may conilict with another and one may be adhered to at the expense of another. Just as what Maugham once pointed out, "The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency". And this, in fact, has been implied in what Grice and Leech advocated.Thus, we are all right to say that it is the goal that gives rise to the appearance and structure of a particular language use. In other words, the goal is the base which serves to regulate and identify the different particular varieties of language use.This goal-oriented approach is applicable not only to pragmatics, but also to discourse analysis and stylistics, because discourse analysis can be regarded simply as a projection of pragmatics into a suprasentential time dimension; and stylistics as the variety of discourse analysis dealing mostly with literary discourse. And in fact, we now take it for granted that the connection of pragmatics with spoken language is only accidental. It is also applicable to written language. In a word, pragmatics deals not only with interpersonal rhetoric but also with textual rhetoric. And business correspondence belongs to interpersonal rhetoric as well as textual rhetoric.Any goal-oriented model of discourse analysis will have to handle the following distinctions:1I) dynamic goals and regulative goals;(2) coexisting goals;(3) subordinate goals and superordinale goals;(4) long-term goals and short-term goals;(5) major goals and minor goals.A special example of these different goals' coexistence is business correspondence. That is to say, we can find all the goals in business writing in the process of any business transaction.Altogether, there are three types of goal in business correspondence. One goal, the most obvious, is to inform the reader. Another goal is to prod the reader into doing something. A third is to make a good impression on...