Relevance Theoretic Approach To The Euphemistic Speech In English Business Correspondence

International trades have become more and more important under thebackground of economic globalization. And entering WTO has provided newopportunities as well as challenges for the international trades of China. As aneffective communication channel of international business, business correspondencehas been playing an increasingly important role in international business activities.When the enterprises carry out the business activities such as promoting their products,attracting customers and enlarging their markets, the strategy they habitually employis the expression of friendly politeness through the use of euphemistic words, elegantstructures and sweet tone, which form the vivid features of English businesscorrespondence.The thesis is expected to shed some light on the teaching and learning of Englishbusiness correspondence and the practical business letter writing in the field offoreign trades, and promote the effective communication between the businesspartners and push the success of the business trades.Since its coming into being, relevance theory has been extensively applied tomany research fields such as translation, film subtitles and advertisement, but seldomto the researches on the euphemistic speech in English business correspondence.Within the framework of Relevance Theory, the euphemistic business correspondenceis not only an encoding-decoding process, but also a kind of ostensive-inferentialcommunication. The writer gives an ostensive stimulus to express a certain meaning,while the reader gets the writer’s informative and communicative intentions by hisown inference. In order to reach a successful communication, the cognitiveenvironments of both sides of communication must be made manifest or mutuallymanifest to each other. Like other kinds of ostensive-inferential communications,business correspondence is also relevance-oriented, and it is the pursuit of optimalrelevance that guarantees the success of communication in business trades. Optimal relevance is achieved by getting enough contextual effects while paying no gratuitousprocessing effort. By seeking optimal relevance, the reader of the euphemisticbusiness letters can easily grasp the real intention of its writer without paying toomuch effort, which paves the way for successful business trades.Based on qualitative analysis of data collected from the published samplebusiness letters, this thesis is devoted to the exploration of the euphemistic speech inEnglish business correspondence from the perspective of Relevance Theory andaimed to answer the following four questions:1. How can the communication model of business correspondence be interpretedby Relevance Theory?2. How to achieve optimal relevance via euphemistic speech in businesscorrespondence?3. What are the linguistic strategies for achieving euphemism in businesscorrespondence?4. What contextual factors do the linguistic choices adapt to?It is found in the present research that euphemistic speech takes on diverselinguistic forms in business correspondence. Avoidance of unpleasant speech sounds,choices of fuzzy and less-offensive terms, passive voice, subjunctive mood, tentativeinterrogative sentences, beating about the bush are the most frequent linguisticchoices made respectively at phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic andpragmatic levels of language use to create euphemistic speech in English businesscorrespondence so as to be adaptable to the cognitive-psychological and social-cultural contexts of business activities.