Analysis Of Courteous Expression In English Business Electronic Mails

Courteous expression, which is considered to be of great significance in thewriting of business letters or E-mails, has been attracting more and more scholars toresearch from many perspectives, such as lexicon, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.And the study of it in pragmatic perspective is mainly based on Grice’s CooperativePrinciple, Leech’s Politeness Principle, Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory, etc.,which can in some way shed light on certain use of words or sentences in businessletters to be more courteous. However, it is far from satisfactory, for these principlescannot explain the phenomenon why these seemingly impolite expressions accordingto the above principles occur regularly in English business letters, especially Englishbusiness electronic mails and still make the international business successful.Therefore, this thesis tries to investigate this phenomenon in the light ofVerschueren’s Adaptation Theory, mainly the four inter-related aspects of adaptability,i.e. contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics ofadaptability, and salience of the adaptation process.The research questions are: Are these traditionally so-called impolite expressionsaccording to the Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, and the Face Theory etc.actually impolite? How to achieve actual courtesy in the writing of English businessE-mails?Both the quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the analysis of the110sample English business E-mails collected from both the real-world companies doinginternational business with foreign companies and the books on foreign trade orinternational business, which aims to make the research more convincible. First ageneral literature review of the current study on courteous expressions and of thetheoretical background of this study---the Adaptation Theory has been given out, which include the definition of courtesy, the importance of being polite or courteousin business letters, the researches on courteous expressions, and three notions ofAdaptation Theory as well as four inter-related aspects of adaptability. Then, themethodology adopted in this thesis is listed which includes the research design, datacollection, selection and case study. At last, a systematic analysis of the sampleelectronic mails from the four inter-related aspects of Adaptation Theory is illustrated.After the systematic analysis of these sample E-mails from the above four anglesof Adaptation Theory, the author makes suggestions on how to achieve actual courtesyin English business E-mails and points out both the reading and understanding ofbusiness E-mails should take the changed context into account and the choice ofeither the courteous expressions or the seemingly impolite expressions is based onboth the salience of the language users and the dynamic process.