A Study On Pragmatic Strategies Of Speech Acts In Business English Correspondences

With the rapid development of economy and international trade, business correspondence plays a significant role in business communication and co operation. With the aims of effective communicating, business correspondences widely apply all means of media to transfer information in the process of exchanging information and transaction. In this paper the speech acts are combining with the analysis of business correspondences from different functional departments; and it also aims to conclude the pragmatic strategies of achieving speech act competency and functional sufficiency in business correspondences. The manifest of speech acts competency and the rules, characteristics and pragmatic strategies of business correspondences are analyzed in this paper and this paper benefits people of deeper understanding to business correspondences, meanwhile provides several pragmatic strategies in business writings.Austin's and Searle's speech act theory are used as the framework and together with the research methods of qualitative and quantitative. This paper generally can be divided into three sections. Firstly, chapter one introduces the background, research questions and significance of this paper while chapter two briefly introduces the theory of speech acts. The speech act theory, which was firstly launched by Austin, aiming of exploring meanings from the pragmatic perspective and in a dynamic way, aroused people's intense attentions. Based on Austin's theory, Searle has verified it into a tighter and perfect one, from the perspective of indirect speech acts. In this section, this paper includes the theory of Austin's perfomatives and constatives hypothesis and his understanding of speech act theory; Searle's felicity conditions and his speech acts theory.Secondly, chapter three expounds the research steps and methods and it includes data collection situation as well. Qualitative and quantitative analysis can be found in the whole research process and Excel acts as an analyzing tool which is utilized in statistics. Referring to the study of pragmatic strategies of business correspondences, case study is also applied.Thirdly, on the basis of speech act theory and qualitative, quantitative research methods, in chapter four all the eighty-two business correspondences are analyzed and then this paper summarizes the pragmatic strategies which can be a reference for the business people in business writings. It points that since there are still some aspects that have not aroused enough attention to the business correspondences writings, we should do further research and discussions.This paper finds an approach that combines the pragmatic perspective with the business correspondence in the hope of formulating an effective pragmatic strategy in business writings. It is a useful analysis in speech acts competency of business correspondences. It paves the way for future similar studies with a wider range of texts'types.