Politeness Strategies For The Speech Act Of Refusal In English Business Letters

As a common speech act in daily communication, refusal has been one of the hottest issues in the study of language use during past 20 years. The focuses of studies on the speech act of refusal lie in several facets, for instance, the influence of social factors on the employment of refusal strategies, the comparison of refusal speech act across cultural groups, or the study of pragmatic transfer by investigating the characteristics of refusals of non-natives. Besides, the speech acts of refusal they studied are performed by in-school college students in the daily interpersonal communication.The impolite and conflictive nature of speech act of refusal is fully manifested when refusals are performed in business communication. The writer has to accomplish two goals when conveying the refusal messages in English business letters. The primary one is to convey the bad news; the secondary one is to maintain goodwill with the reader. Any mishandling of the performance of refusal would alienate (potential) customers and bring economic losses. Because of this, politeness should be paid more attention to in English business letters conveying refusal news.Therefore, the present thesis is intended to study refusals in English business letters from the perspective of politeness under the guideline of Brown and Levinson's face theory. The author first makes an elaboration of the speech act of refusal, especially the one in English business letters, and the face theory. Based on these, the author conducts a thorough analysis of the politeness strategies for refusals in English business letters. It is found that the politeness strategies used to perform refusals include positive politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies as well as bald-on-record strategies, each of which finds a variety of linguistic realizations. In the process of analysis, each strategy is backed up with examples. By making quantitative analysis of these strategies, it is also found that when the writer performs the refusal the more frequently utilized strategy is negative politeness strategies, followed by positive politeness strategies. Bald-on-record is not used too much. To a certain degree, such distribution is related to the writer's goals. The most favored linguistic realizations of politeness are Attending to Hearer, Asserting common ground, Hedging, Stating reasons and Impersonalizing. Reasons for the popularity of these strategies are also explored.The present study is helpful for people to better employ politeness strategies to performing refusals in business communication and improve their writing ability so as to guarantee the successful communication. It is also believed that the present study will be beneficial to both the research and teaching of English business letter writing.