A Study On Pragmatic Strategies Of The Speech Acts In English Business Letters Of Payments

As an important part of the commercial correspondence, letters of payments plays an important role in international trading activities. The purpose of a payment letter is to provide commodity information to the buyer, including the trade name, the specification, quantity, the packing condition, the price, terms of payment and terms of delivery, etc.Letters of payments are useful for both the seller who provides the commodity information and terms of payments and the buyer who expects to raise specific requirements or to negotiate with the seller. For example, the seller can list the reason why he needs the information of the customer's financial situation and the business integrity whereas the buyer should explain why he asks for easier payment terms, amending terms of payment and so on. Therefore, an effective payment letter depends on different linguistic realizations and the communicative purpose of different speech acts has to be fulfilled through different pragmatic strategies. In recent years, linguists have paid much attention to how to use language in business letters. Researches have been done into the linguistic features, style and characteristics of business letters, but the analysis of English letters of payments has not been given sufficient attention.Based on Austin and Searle's speech act theory, this study is intended to explore the different speech acts in English letters of payments and discuss the pragmatic strategies adopted thereof. A small corpus of 60 English letters of payments is built and analyzed according to Searle's typology of speech acts. It is found that all the five types of speech acts including assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations are present in English payment letters, among which directives are the most frequently used. Moreover, want statement, mood derivable, explicit performative and query preparatory are the four most frequently employed pragmatic strategies. It is hoped that the findings of this study will be conducive to the business letter writers to build up a harmonious and cooperative relationship and prompt the smooth conduct of trade and eventually achieve successful trade.