| The rapid development of modem economy, science and technology brings to the enterprises all over the world infinite commerce chances and wide developing space, making the international business interactions become more frequent than ever before. Business interaction is essentially an economic activity through language. Whether it succeeds or not depends largely on the participants' use of language, since during the business communication, both panics have to cooperate as well as compete against each other, either party would endeavor to win the most possible profit while maintaining cooperation. So it is indispensable for either negotiation party to employ proper politeness strategies in gaining advantages over the other. When business negotiation escalates into conflict, each party should tactfully use the politeness strategies and maxims to show the other party his/her friendliness, deference or considerateness, to play down the imposition, to try to avoid the risk of face threatening acts (FTAs for short) and leave freedom for self to act. Undoubtedly, this goal cannot be achieved without a strategic use of language.As we know, politeness is the main topic in pragmatics. However, most of the related politeness studies of interethnic or intro-ethnic communication, have primarily drawn on observations from empirical studies of spoken language and have mostly focused on face-to-face interaction in non-professional settings: Goffman (1959. 1967), Leech (1983), Brown & Levinson (1978. 1987). Gu Yueguo (1990, 1992). Little attention is paid on written language in professional settings. Not until the last few years can we read some such theses: Myers (1989). Zhu Weifang (1998), Yeung (1997). Kurzon (2001). However, a contrastive study of the politeness and politeness strategies between English and Chinese in the professional settings seems to be fewer, while contrastive study is an effective way to improve our communicative competence and enhance our awareness of cultural differences. Moreover, a survey of the books on business correspondences reveals a lack of attention to those crucial matters of style and content rather than only the form, simply combining several volumes of "model letters'' from which a user may choose. Yet no matter how many model letters or phrases those books contain.it is unlikely to be a satisfactory substitute for an effective personal writing style and will probably not meet the complex communicative needs of the people in today's business world. This study is carried out to tackle such problems, to improve English and Chinese learners" communicative competence and to facilitate communication between China and English-speaking countries.The researcher collected from Zhuzhou Siemenz Traction Equipment Ltd, Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Works & its eight branches, Hunan Import & Export Ltd. and Seasia Enterprise Ltd. 412 business letters, from which 176 (88 Chinese and 88 English) business negotiation letters in the conflict stage are obtained by categorization. After that 60 letters (30 Chinese and 30 English) are got by systemic sampling to help conduct the quantitative study. Then based on Brown & Levinson's and Gu Yueguo's politeness models, a qualitative study on the similarities and differences between the politeness strategies and maxims used to save face in both English and Chinese business negotiation letters in the conflict stage is carried out by analyzing some typical sentences selected from the 60 letters. A hypothesis-test investigation is done to test the significance of the difference between the mean frequencies of the politeness strategies and maxims. Lastly, exploration is done on the implication of the study and the cultural and linguistic environment reasons for their differentiated background, such as value systems, thought patterns and different concepts of face and FTAs.The dissertation demonstrates that there are similarities and differences not only between the Chinese and English politeness strategies and maxims but also between their interpretati... |
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