A Contrastive Analysis Of Speech Acts In English And Chinese Business Correspondence

With the rapid development of economic globalization, international anddomestic trade has become more and more frequent, and the economic exchangesbetween China and Western countries are increasingly active. In business dealings,business correspondence, which is an essential link between the trading activities, is awritten-form communication between companies or industries and their customers tomaintain business contracts. Because of its great importance in the trade flow, greatattentions have been received not only from the participants in the business activities,but also from linguists and the language learners.However, the author finds that most of the previous studies on businesscorrespondence are made from perspectives of politeness theories, stylistics in singlelanguage or one kind of business correspondences. Few researches have been madebased on Leech’s categorizing model and Searle’s classification model. In addition,from the literature review, the author finds that there is no statistic study on Leech’sview of the interactive relationship between his categories and Searle’s classificationof speech acts. So in order to make a relatively comprehensive analysis, the businesscorrespondence used in this thesis can be classified into four types (collaborative,convivial, competitive and conflictive) according to Leech’s illocutionaryfunctions-based categories, and the speech acts are assessed and classified into fivegroups (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and indirect directives) basedon Searle’s constitutive rules. The authentic correspondences applied in this thesis areprovided by some friends in different companies and the non-authenticcorrespondences are mainly collected from books.In this thesis, both quantitative and qualitative researches are made. In the step ofquantitative research, the frequencies and significant values are calculated based ontheir classifications. In the step of qualitative research, the analysis of similarities anddifferences between Chinese and English and the assessment of match and mismatchbetween illocutionary categories and speech act types are studied based on the statistic results. Meanwhile, the possible factors that influence those similarities anddifferences, match and mismatch are also studied. In that way, a contrastive analysisof English business correspondences and Chinese business correspondences areachieved.According to the quantitative and qualitative researches made in this thesis, theresults show that there are some similarities and differences between English andChinese business correspondence as well as among those types of correspondences.From the overall and type-based perspective, more direct directives are used inChinese business correspondence than in English business correspondence except theconflictive correspondence. And there are more assertives in collaborative businesscorrespondence; the expressives are more frequently applied in the convivialcorrespondence when compared with other types of business correspondence; andmore assertives are used in the competitive and conflictive correspondence. Theresults show that the correlationship between illocutionary types and speech acts typesare partially proved.According to the researches, this thesis aims to find the similarities anddifferences between English and Chinese business correspondence as well as amongthose types. Meanwhile, it is expected to provide a statistic base for Leech’s view ofthe interactive relationship between his illocutionary functions-based categories andSearle’s speech acts. And then the author tries to put forward some recommendationsto promote the researches in speech acts and the business correspondence teachingand writing, and promote the standardization and normalization of correspondencewriting in real business transactions.