An Analysis Of Vague Language In Business English Correspondence From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the rapid development of global economy,most business groups and individuals are constantly doing business together.Business English correspondence serves as the bridge in communicating with each other and no other communication media can replace the important function of this form.Tracing back to previous times,most scholars and researchers found expressions of business English correspondence are to some extent precise and stringent.And there are well acknowledged “Seven Cs” Principle,namely consideration,clarity,courtesy,concreteness,correctness,conciseness,and completeness,serving as the basic writing principle in business English correspondence.However,after doing researches of lots of business English correspondence,the author found many vague languages in such correspondence and those vague words are effective in making correspondence more rigorous and polite,leaving more space for future negotiation,and laying a greater foundation for future business relations.This thesis mainly focuses on Belgium’s linguist Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory,and the theory is about constantly making linguistic choices in words,and people from different social stratifications and backgrounds will make various choices.Furthermore,language vagueness is just a reflection of the Adaptation Theory in business English correspondence.Under the guidance of such scientific and rational theoretical framework,the author mainly puts efforts in the following three aspects: The first is about the distribution situation and frequency of vague language in business English correspondence,and reasons for realizing the adaptation of vague language in each type of correspondence.The next research aspect is about how vague language in business English correspondence realizes the adaptation to physical world,mental world and social world.The final research scope is the pragmatic effects of vague language in business English correspondence.The author firstly defines the classification of business English correspondence,and selects 60 examples in 6 types.And the Antconc software is used as the detection tool to filter and calculate vague language in each correspondence.Next,the qualitative and quantitative research methods are combined to analyze each type’s adapting situations.What’s more,vague languages’ proportion and frequency in each correspondence are also discussed from the perspectives of lexical level and syntactical level.Lastly,the author selects samples to analyze vague language’s adaptation to physical world,mental world,and social world and explains the pragmatic effects of vague words in each correspondence.Through the analysis of the research questions and collected materials,the author concludes as follows: Firstly,vague languages account for a high percentage in each type of correspondence.After calculating all six types of correspondence,the author finds the average percentage of vague languages’ frequency is 8%-10.5%.Secondly,reasons for adapting vague languages are clearly illustrated from addressors’ and addressees’ perspectives,and they are mainly about considering one’s own interests,adapting to social status and cultural conventions,and adapting to people’s purposes,emotions and the forth.Finally,vague languages are featured with various pragmatic functions in each type of correspondence,namely making the expression more polite and objective,insuring the flexibility,and enhancing the self-protection.This thesis clearly illustrates the important functions of vague language in business English correspondence,and inspires foreign language learners and business participants to pay more attention to their methods in learning or writing business correspondence.The proper usage of vague language can guarantee the preciseness and reasonability of the content and contribute to the successful business cooperation.Meanwhile,as for the future research in this field,the author hopes expanded researches can be achieved,including business contracts,business negotiation and so on.More aspects of adaptation principles should also be explored and applied,and more scientific and comprehensive corpus-based analysis can be constructed to reach influential results in this field.