Pragmatic Principles In Business English Application Areas,

The three pragmatic principles-Cooperative principle, Politeness principle, and Relevance principle, are widely used to guide our interpersonal communication. They were put forward by American linguist: Grice, British scholar: Leech, French Psychologist: Sperber and British pragmatic professor Wilson respectively. Each of them made a great contribution to the pragmatic study of a certain situational conversation. Grice's Politeness principle and his conversational implicature describes that people usually obey this principle, but sometimes they violate it in communication. At the same time, it tells us how to infer the implicature in conversation. But it has not explained why people violate the principle deliberately. The Politeness principle explains the cases that people violate the Cooperative principle are for the purpose of politeness. The Relevance principle was put forward from a cognitive angle and it is a complement to the Cooperative principle.Business English letter being a written style of conversation, its writing needs the guide of pragmatic principles. The writing principles in business English embody the pragmatic principles. This paper is to discuss how to apply the above-mentioned three pragmatic principles to business English letter writing and analyze the relationship between the pragmatic principles and business English letter writing principles. In view of the limitations of the three pragmatic principles and the defects in the guidelines of business English writing principles, this paper also puts forward a new concept (which is quoted from Philosophy and Mathematics), the Degree Category of the application of pragmatic principles in business English, and draw a conclusion: only by having a good command of the Degree Category of the application of the pragmatic principles, can we extend the directing functions of pragmatic principles, and make business English writing principles become more reasonable and perfect.