An Investigation On (Im)politeness Of Request Strategies In Belf Emails

With the development of international trade,English has become the preferred working language in business contexts,which is called Business English as Lingua Franca,shorten as BELF.BELF,combining the characteristics of cross-cultural communication and English as lingua franca,has become a hot research topic in recent years.Business email is one of the most commonly used applications of BELF in cross-cultural business contexts that play an important role in exchanging information,promoting cooperation,and maintaining good interpersonal relationships.The request is a kind of speech act of directives,which is very common in business emails.When making a request,the speaker usually uses words to let the hearer perform a certain behavior that is usually beneficial to the speaker.Request in the business email is often to expect the other party to provide some required information.From politeness theory,the request is an impolite behavior that threatens the hearer's negative face,so the speaker often adopts certain request strategies to help him mitigate the threat to the other party's face and make the other party more receptive to his request behavior.Therefore,the use of request strategies in the business email is a noteworthy issue.This study takes some authentic business English email as the research corpus and analyzes the request strategies through qualitative and quantitative research.It is found that the most commonly used request strategy in these business English emails is mood derivable,then the second is query preparatory under the non-conventionally indirect request strategies,the mild hints are not found in the corpus.Besides,the sub-strategy under the same request strategy has a big gap in the frequency of use.Then,the author investigates related practitioners' opinions on the relationship between the degree of politeness and the degree of the directness of requests through questionnaires.The results show that there seems no specific relationship between them: indirectness does not necessarily imply politeness.The author believes that in addition to the genre characteristics of email,contextual factor,and social factor,practitioners' cognition of the relationship between directness and politeness is also one of the factors that affect their choice of different request strategies.From the perspective of BELF,this study explores the characteristics of the use of request strategies in email,which could enrich the research perspective of Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns(CCSARP).Secondly,the use of authentic corpus instead of the Discourse Completion Test(DCT)is more valuable for research.Besides,the study of request speech acts in the email is also helpful to improve the pragmatic and communicative competence of cross-cultural communicators,which could reduce pragmatic failure,improve work efficiency,and providing inspiration for business English teaching as well.