A Pragmatic Study On The Vague Language In Business Correspondence

According to"Seven Cs"Principle (i.e. language in the business correspondence should be concrete, complete, correct, clear, concise, convincing and courteous), the language in business correspondence should be clear and concrete. It then appears that vague language should be avoided if possible while writing business letters. However, upon observation, it is found to be widely employed in many types of business letters. It benefits the addresser a lot by making business letter more flexible, appropriate and polite. Through retrieval of previous studies on this linguistic phenomenon in business letters, the author has detected that most of them are concerned with the pragmatic functions of vague language, leaving many other aspects untouched such as linguistic realization of vagueness, frequency of vague language use, pragmatic interpretation of it and so on. Moreover, they have treated business correspondence in an overall way, or in other words, they have neglected the differences in the employment of vague language in different types of business letters. It is therefore of great significance to conduct a comparatively comprehensive study on the vague language in different types of business letters.Based on the established corpus, the author takes a tentative insight into the vague language used in eight types of business letter to seek answers to the following four questions:1. When do people tend to use vague language?2. Are there any differences in the frequency & means of linguistic realization of vague language in these eight types of business letters? If any, how about the reasons for them?3. What kinds of pragmatic effects may vague language generate?4. Why does employment of vague language not necessarily lead to the failure but to successful conclusion of business communication?The major findings of the present research are:People may resort to vague language when they are 1) unable to be more precise; 2) unwilling to be more precise.The frequency of vague language in different types of business letters is different. A hierarchical order of the frequency of vague language in eight types of business letters is as follows: Sales letter >Re-inquiry letter > Inquiry letter > Complaint letter> Adjustment letter > Counter-offer > Offer>Order letter.Vagueness in business correspondence could be realized through three means---lexical means, syntactical means and hedges.Vague language is able to benefit addresser a lot in helping him realize his communicative purposes by generating the following pragmatic effects: 1) making the language more persuasive; 2) self-protecting; 3) withholding some information; 4) making the business letter more polite.Vague language in business correspondence is the result of linguistic choices. It is adaptable to the addresser's communicative intentions, politeness motivation and cooperation motivation.