Pragmatic Researches On Language Vagueness In English Business Correspondence

With the rapid development of economy, the relations between countries have become closer. As English has become one of the most prevalent languages, English business correspondence has developed into a most significant way of communication in business circle. Until now, when speaking of business writing, the students majoring in International Trade as well as the businessmen have been considering that they should follow "Seven Cs Principle" in dealing with a business letter (i.e.:Consideration, Courtesy, Clarity, Correctness, Conciseness, Concreteness, and Completeness). However, it turns out that vague expressions have been frequently employed according to lots of statistics and researches; and its existence has enhanced the possibility of success in business communication.According to Steward (1984), business correspondence is divided into six types (correspondence for establishing business and sales, enquiry and offer, counter offer and counter-counter offer, order and payment, insurance and shipment, complaint and settlement) in terms of its functions. The result of this thesis reveals that the application of vagueness exists in correspondence for establishing business and sales most frequently; the following goes to correspondence for order and payment, enquiry and offer, insurance and shipment, complaint and settlement, counter offer and counter-counter offer respectively. The different frequency depends on their different communicative goals. The result shows that vagueness adapts to "mental world","social world" and "physical world" of communicators in order to protect face.First, the quantitative approach is employed in this thesis. The present study selects60letters totally, which covers six types of business letters, as the corpora. When conducting an analysis of those letters, lexical vagueness, syntactical vagueness, and total number of vagueness in those letters have been laid in comparison with each other. Through the comparison, the study arrives at a conclusion that the correspondence for establishing business relations and sales took up the highest frequency among the six types of letters in question.Then the thesis analyzes the corpus on the basis of Politeness Principle and Adaptation Theory. In accordance with Adaptation Theory, the study has investigated the letters in terms of social, mental and physical dimensions. On the basis of Politeness Principle, this thesis conducts an analysis from the following six maxims, i.e., tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, agreement maxim, and sympathy maxim. The purpose for employing vagueness is to protect self-benefit, enhance the persuasiveness, and make the language more polite.The business correspondence is divided into six types, according to Steward (1984). This thesis manages to conduct an analysis of application of vagueness in English business letters via quantitative and qualitative approaches. Through the quantitative approach, the thesis categorizes the samples of business letter and figures out what type of business letters is used most frequently. According to the present research, it turns out that the top-one goes to the correspondence for establishing business relations and sales; the top-two goes to the correspondence for order and payment; the top-three stands for the correspondence for enquiry and offer; the fourth represents the correspondence for insurance and shipment; then comes the correspondence for complaint and settlement; and the correspondence for counter offer and counter-counter offer. The frequency of vagueness depends on the different types of business correspondence and different communicative goals. The research also reveals that it is indispensable to utilize the vagueness in business letters. Meanwhile, application of vagueness in business letters tends to be the adaptation for mutual mental world, physical world and social world. Moreover, it performs the functions as follows:(1) protecting self-benefit,(2) enhancing the persuasiveness,(3) making the language more polite.