A Pragmatic Analysis Of Refusal Strategies In Chinese Business Letters

Refusal is one kind of speech acts frequently used in daily life. And it is also a face threatening act in nature. Refusal letters, as one special kind of business letters, demand special requirements besides politeness and tact. At present, most of researches about refusal speech at home or abroad focus on cross-cultural comparison and pragmatic approach. Moreover, one of their finding contributes to conclusion of refusal strategies both in oral and in written form. However, few refer to pragmatic analysis of refusal letters in business field.Based on the previous studies, this paper reorganizes frequently used refusal strategies of Chinese business letters into five categories. It generally introduces the features of each refusal strategy and analyzes the chosen sample to see which refusal strategy it adopts. Using the method of qualitative analysis, this paper does pragmatic analysis toward the five refusal strategies. Under the theory frame of Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech and Gu Yueguo's Politeness Theory, this study analyzes the form of refusal strategies and the effect of cooperative principle as well as politeness theory on these strategies with certain specific examples. The result indicates that:Firstly, each maxim of cooperative principle to some extent affects the choice of refusal strategies.Secondly, violating quantity maxim of Cooperative Principle is frequently used to provide added information to form an effective pragmatic strategy and produce a certain conversational implicature. It achieves the purpose of refusing others on one hand, and pays attention to politeness on the other hand. In fact, the main purpose of violating cooperative principle is to be polite.Thirdly, the politeness based on Chinese culture runs through each refusal strategy, of which each maxim is paid different attention.Fourthly, self- denigration maxim and address maxim of politeness have little effect on refusal strategies, while tact maxim and agreement maxim greatly affect the choice of postponement strategy and compliment strategy respectively on the aspect of wording.A business refusal letter with proper strategy not only can help the writer persuade customers to accept the reason for being refused when conveying an unpleasant information, but also maintain sound trade and cooperative relation in future business communication, which is not only the standard for judging the success of refusal strategy, but also is the practical implication of this study. This paper extending written refusal strategies into business field provides a model for the research of business teaching. And also enriches the practical application of pragmatic theory into business letters.