A Pragmatic Analysis Of Vagueness In English Business Letters Of Claim

With the globalization of the world’s economy, the international trade is becoming more and more frequent. However, during trade activities, business conflicts and troubles are sometimes unavoidable. English business letter of claim (LOC) undoubtedly plays an essential role in the foreign trading.It is universally held that, in business correspondences, more exact expressions should be used to avoid inconvenience and misunderstandings. However, people hold this view neglect a natural property of human language--vagueness. The present study focuses on the employment of vagueness in LOC. It mainly belongs to a qualitative analysis based on data collected from books concerning business letter writing. It aims to discuss these following three questions:1.The frequency of vague language in LOC;2. the reason why people use vague language in LOC;3. the pragmatic functions of vagueness in LOC. A comprehensive study on the vague language in LOC has great practical importance. This thesis analyzes vagueness in LOC and explores the pragmatic functions of vagueness based on Cooperative Principle (CP), Politeness Principle (PP) and Face Theory (FT). The result indicates that the use of vague language has greatly enhanced the flexibility of the expression and made claim letters more polite and considerate.The present thesis firstly gives an introduction to the research we will embark on, including research purposes, significance, data collection, methodology and layout of the thesis. Then it presents an overview literature of former researches concerning vagueness. Different approaches to vagueness are discussed from four perspectives: philosophical, semantic, cognitive and pragmatic. A brief investigation of etymology of "vague" is also discussed. For the main purpose of business activities is good communication, this thesis mainly analyzes vagueness in LOC from the perspective of pragmatics. The theoretical framework mainly introduces the pragmatic theories of PP, CP and FT, each with its own focus and orientation. After introducing the theoretical framework of this study, detailed analysis on vagueness in LOC follows. And based on50claim correspondences, this thesis verifies the frequent employment of vague language in LOC. Besides, the author points out that such vagueness can be realized in various forms--vague words, vague additives and specific sentence patterns. Through analysis of vagueness in LOC based on pragmatic theories, it explains the reason why people use vague language a lot. CP, PP and FT are applied not only to make interpretations of this adoption of vagueness in business communication but more importantly to serve as guidance for the proper use of vagueness in LOC writing. Since vague language is unavoidable in LOC, the study moves on to probe into the pragmatic functions of vagueness based on data collected. The author holds the view that vagueness can help business people to improve the appropriateness of the utterance, to enhance the flexibility of the utterance, to show politeness and to achieve certain goals. The last is a concluding remark, which sums up main findings of this thesis and also puts forward some suggestions for further vagueness study. At the same time, the limitation and implication are also displayed. Although some limitations can be found, the present study has its significance, such as to make some contribution to researches on vague language, to help business students to better understand and apply business English, to facilitate business people to apply vague language in business communication in a tactful and appropriate way.This study is useful for the understanding of why people employ vague language in LOC and helping people write claim letters in a tactful way. It is hoped that present study may enrich the study on vagueness.