A Quantitative Analysis Of Positive And Negative Strategies Applied In English Letters Of International Trade

With the development of economic globalization, business communication hasbeen expanded across nations, regions and cultures for the need of international tradeactivities. Foreign trade correspondence, as a kind of more effective, economic, efficientand convenient means of communication, has been gradually accepted and frequentlyapplied by businessman.There became an academic boom of studying the characteristics, classification, andwriting strategies of foreign trade correspondence. Many scholars focus on the linguisticrealization of the Face Theory in business English letters and have been obtained manyachievements in this field. However, most of their studies observed within small samplesand adopted qualitative method as the main analysis approach to describe and examinethe application of face strategies in business English letters. Studies employing thequantitative analysis to examine large samples of trade correspondences are rare.In the light of the model of positive and negative politeness strategies indicated byBrown and Levinson, the present thesis collected more than700English foreign tradeletters from the latest and authoritative resources. Then according to the definitions andcharacteristics of good news, bad news, neutral news and persuasive business letters, all700letters are classified into four types and then analyzed by quantitative analysismethod to examine how Brown and Levinson’s positive and negative politenessstrategies are applied in these four types of letters.Through the process of analysis and comparison, it is concluded that the positiveand negative face strategies are applied differently in the four kinds of foreign tradecorrespondences.The aim of this thesis is to provide some inspirations for businessman and Englishlearners through the above analysis, to help them appropriately use positive and negativepoliteness strategies in different types of foreign trade correspondence.