Politeness Strategy And Its Application In Foreign Trade Correspondence

Since the 1970s, politeness as a research topic has been enjoying much popularity with scholars specializing in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and cross-cultural communication, and remarkable achievements have been gained. Among them, Brown and Levinson's Face-saving Theory and Leech's Politeness Principle are widely applied, which makes them the guiding theories of researches on politeness. As a type of practical writing, foreign trade correspondence (FTC) plays a vital role in international trade activities. Actually, it is a written form of negotiation and, together with face-to-face negotiation, promotes the process of business cooperation. This thesis holds that politeness strategies have a very important regulatory effect on FTC. They are important mitigating forces in making the language more polite and the discourse structure more proper.Based on the framework of the Face-saving Theory and the Politeness Principle, this thesis, through case study, focuses on how to apply politeness strategies in the four categories of FTC on the levels of language and discourse structure, thus to realize politeness on the basis of fulfilling the writer's communicative goals and consequently to obtain implications.According to Leech's classification of illocutionary functions, FTC can be classified accordingly into four categories: collaborative, competitive, convivial and conflictive. In the special communicative context of business cooperation, the primary function of collaborative FTC is to convey information. This requires the writer not only to comply with the trade norms in language use, but to employ a straightforward approach in discourse organization, thus to achieve the best result of information transfer and meanwhile to help improve the goodwill of both sides and strengthen their business relationship. Competitive FTC aims to persuade the reader to accept the writer's request which threatens the reader's negative face. In order to lower the degree of imposition on the reader and enable him to willingly accept the request, negative politeness strategies should be mainly employed in language use and a roundabout approach be followed in paragraph arrangement. Although convivial FTC conveys information that is to the reader's benefit, improper language use and discourse structure will affect the degree of politeness. Concrete and direct expression and deductive discourse structure can best satisfy the reader's face wants. Contrarily, since conflictive FTC is impolite by nature, indirectness of language is the fundamental strategy to realize politeness and inductive discourse structure should be adopted. Hence, the threat on the reader's positive face is mitigated and meanwhile the intended communicative goal is fulfilled. Finally, the study puts forward that FTC writing should abide by the principle of appropriateness and the tendency of contemporary FTC writing should not be overlooked.This thesis aims to assist related business people to adopt proper politeness strategies so as to fulfill their communicative goals more effectively. It is also expected that it may be useful and possibly helpful to business English teachers and related training departments of foreign trade corporations.