Analysis Of Politeness Expression In English Business E-Mails From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

In modern business activities, e-mails gradually take the place of traditional correspondence due to feature of convenience and speediness. E-mails play an important role in making business contacts, dealing with problems, and building rapport, which also influences clients’ evaluation of enterprises’ image and strength. Therefore, businesspeople have to lay more emphasis on the polite level of language in order to ensure the business activity run smoothly.This thesis employs Verschueren’s linguistic adaptation theory as theoretical framework, analyzes and discusses how politeness expressions are used in business e-mails to help realize the business purpose. Thereby the following two research questions are put forward: what are the features of politeness expression in different types of English business e-mails? How can politeness expression be realized in different English business e-mails from the perspective of linguistic adaptation?In order to carry out a systematic analysis of business e-mail, this study classifies 129 business e-mails collected from a company engaged in import business into four types based on Leech’s classification of illocutionary acts: collaborative e-mails, convivial e-mails, competitive e-mails and conflictive e-mails. Then politeness expressions are analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative approaches from the perspective of adaptation theory. Simple statistics is used in the quantitative analysis to provide frequency of some specific polite expressions in different types of business e-mails; and the qualitative analysis is used to analyze the politeness expressions in business e-mails from such angles as contextual correlates of adaptation, structural objects of adaptation, and dynamics of adaptation.The major findings suggest that the politeness level of business e-mails from one transaction is changing along with different communicative contexts and purposes. The adaptation to contextual correlates and structural objects also varies in different types of business e-mails. To be specific, different kinds of politeness expressions are more frequently used in collaborative and convivial business e-mails; the aim of competitive business e-mails is to persuade the receivers to take certain action, so the demand for politeness expressions is also relatively higher; while compared with those three types of business e-mails, some seemingly impolite and direct expressions which violate traditional politeness theory often occur in the conflictive emails. However, considered from the dynamic perspective of adaptation theory, this does not mean that these businesspeople do not pay attention to politeness expressions, which are exactly the result of dynamic adaptation to changing context and communicative goal.This study applies adaptation theory in the detailed analysis of English business e-mails, which is expected to provide businesspeople with some insightful reference in their communicative activities, and also to be useful and possibly helpful to the teaching of business e-mail writing.