A Study Of Pragmatic Characteristics On Business English

With the integration of the world economy, the globalization of information and the cultural diversity, international business activities become increasingly frequent,"Business English", as a medium of communication used by people engaged in business activities, is widely applied and plays an increasingly significant role in such international business exchange as trade, transportation, insurance, finance and the rest. Business English falls into the category of ESP (English for special purpose). It not only possesses the specificity in business context, but is closely related to GE (general English). It is featured with clear sense of purpose, strong objectivity, as well as standard and concise language. It has been50years since people showed interest and concern in BE. During the50years, multinational linguists have made extensive investigation and study on the linguistic features of BE and achieved fruitful results. However, comparing with other fields, the research on BE is not enough. For the existing study in this field is mainly on the characteristics of business English, its translation and teaching from the perspective of register theory and functional linguistics; in fact, as the media in business communication, we can probe into its practical application, change and development from the angle of cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics; thus we can say, there is still much room left for the research of BE. On the basis of former research on BE, this thesis applies such pragmatic principles as the theory of context, speech act theory, cooperative principle and politeness principle, etc, to explore business English from a pragmatic point of view. Study shows that Business English has such pragmatic characteristics as follows:First, business English is functioning as the communicative medium on the basis of business context; Second, parties in communication use various business speech acts for some kind of business purposes; Third, for effective communication in business affairs, parties involved need to use properly the four maxims of quality, quantity, relation, manner and converse politely in the course of communication in order to promote business cooperation and facilitate business transaction. The present study intends to provide some basic pragmatic rules for business people and endeavor to improve their competence and effectiveness of using BE, so as to make BE function preferably as the communicative medium in various business activities and meanwhile promote business exchange to go with a swing.