| Since1970s, pragmatics has been regarded as a basic and independent branch ofthe linguistics, which studies how language is actually used in actual languagecommunication. The rising of pragmatic studies has drawn more and more attentionfrom linguists and language researchers all around the world. The two profoundtheories-Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle play a vital role in pragmatics.The Cooperative Principle is proposed by Grice in1967. However, the CooperativePrinciple can’t make a satisfactory explanation of the reason why people deliberatelyflout CP to express their ideas implicitly rather than explicitly. Then a new pragmatictheory-PP came into being, which is developed by a great deal of linguists such asGoffman, Lakoff, Brown and Levinson, and Leech. The Politeness Principle isconsidered as supplement to the Cooperative Principle, the Cooperative Principle andthe Politeness Principle are closely related to each other. Currently, there are also agreat many linguists at home and abroad pay great attention to the study of CP and PP.Currently, in the era of the economic globalization, business activities becomeincreasingly rapid. With the development of internet and computer, the businesse-mail, with the characteristics of immediateness，cheapness and convenience, isreplacing the traditional business letters, and becomes the indispensable part ofmodern business activities. However, during the course of transaction, pragmaticstrategy is a means used by the language users to achieve the communicative goal andis an important pragmatic way to make the transaction successful.Leech (1978) classified the illocutionary functions into four categories:competitive, convivial, collaborative and conflictive. On the basis of this theory, thedata was categorized as four types, namely, the competitive business e-mails, theconvivial business e-mails, the collaborative business e-mails and the conflictivebusiness e-mails. On the basis of Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategy, this thesisadopts both the qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze a total of collected100English business e-mails. The author intends to answer the following questions: (1) How are the different politeness strategies embodied in the English businesse-mails?(2) Are there any differences between politeness strategies employed in thedifferent types of English business e-mails?(3)What is the frequency of theiroccurrence in each type of English business e-mails?The study is composed of six parts. Chapter one is a general introduction to theresearch, including the research background, significance of the research and layoutof the thesis. Chapter two gives an overview of the theoretical foundation of thisthesis, such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Leech’s Politeness Principle, Brown&Levinson’s Politeness Principle and the relationship between Cooperative Principleand Politeness Principle. Chapter three conducts a brief survey of e-mail,encompassing the history of e-mail, working mechanism of e-mail, and the linguisticfeatures of e-mail. And this chapter also tells the difference between e-mail and letterfrom three aspects: format, language features and visualization. Chapter four isdevoted to the research questions, methodology, data collection and data classification.Chapter five is the main part of this thesis. In this chapter, the data analysis willinvolve the qualitative analysis and the quantitative analysis of the data. Chapter sixdraws a conclusion to this thesis, which includes the major findings, implications,limitations and suggestions for further study.Through analysis, it’s found that: Firstly, by employing the qualitative study ofthe politeness strategies in the four types of English business e-mails has proved thatBrown and Levinson’s face management politeness strategy is practical and is widelyused in the business e-mails. Secondly, by the means of quantitative analysis, thefrequency and distribution of politeness strategies vary in different kinds of businesse-mails. On the one hand, in competitive business e-mails, the negative politenessstrategies are used more frequently than the positive politeness strategies. In theconvivial business e-mails, the positive politeness strategies carry more weight thannegative politeness strategies. In the collaborative business e-mails, positive strategiesand negative strategies are almost equally frequent. In the conflictive business e-mails,the negative politeness strategies become far more important than the positivepoliteness strategies. On the other hand, the convivial business e-mails enjoy the highest frequency of application of the positive politeness strategies and theconflictive business e-mails enjoy the lowest frequency of application of the positivepoliteness strategies. Vice versa, the conflictive business e-mails enjoy the highestfrequency of application of the negative politeness strategies and the convivialbusiness e-mails enjoy the lowest frequency of application of the negative politenessstrategies.The study embodies the pragmatic theories in the business field. It will not onlyhelp those people who are working in the field of foreign trade to write the businesse-mails to communicate with the customers appropriately and fulfill the transactionsuccessfully, but also be of pedagogical implications for business English teachingand writing. |
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