A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Non-English Major Graduates' English Cover Letters

With the development of philosophy and linguistics, pragmatics is becoming vital and vigorous. Many scholars and experts have made researches on pragmatics and its relevant topics. A set of phenomena including deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, conversation and the like are widely discussed and pragmatic studies of both spoken and written discourses are colossal. The cover letter is a special kind of verbal communication by means of writing, and it belongs to the scope of pragmatic studies. However, so far there have been no studies that probe into cover letters from a pragmatic point of view. Moreover, in our English teaching, teachers take the cover letter as a kind of practical writings and only instruct the students how to write a cover letter in a standard way. Thus, the generic structure of the cover letter earned recognition, yet, its special communicative purpose—persuade the potential employers to offer an interview is overlooked. In reality, there are problems of this and problems of that shown in many college graduates'cover letters. For those who want to hunt for a job in foreign enterprises, their English cover letters are far from satisfactory. It is found that weakness of pragmatic knowledge and shortage of pragmatic competence is the bottleneck which accounts for the failure of those cover letters'realizing their communicative purpose. In order to find a solution to this problem, the present thesis studies cover letters from a pragmatic perspective, aiming to help develop the English learners'pragmatic competence.The thesis investigates the pragmatic features presented in Chinese non-English major graduates'English cover letters and pragmatic problems shown in those cover letters, with the intention to find what Chinese non-English major graduates'pragmatic competence is like. A corpus of fifty English cover letters is taken for analysis. Both a quantitative and a qualitative approach are applied to the present research.Findings suggest that Chinese non-English major graduates'English cover letters are typical of three features at the level of politeness principle, generic structure and...