A Pragmatic Study Of Ritual Politeness In Commercial Email Replies

With globalization and trade between countries,business cooperation has become increasingly important.As the primary medium for exchanging business information,business email has become a hot topic for domestic scholars.A host of scholars have employed the politeness principle to examine the characteristics,writing,and translation of commercial emails,but few have researched the communicative effects of ritual politeness;accordingly,this thesis will specialize in ritual politeness in commercial email replies.This thesis attempts to employ Kádár’s ritualistic politeness analysis framework to analyze the ritual utterances of a domestic and commercial company and further explore the characteristics,communicative effects and nature of politeness in ritual utterances.It is devoted to probing the following three questions:(1)What are the linguistic features of ritual utterances in commercial email replies?(2)What are the communicative effects of ritual utterances in commercial email replies?(3)Why do ritual utterances produce these communicative effects in commercial email replies? Based on the distinct classification of ritual utterances,this thesis investigates the continuum of ritual politeness,impoliteness and mock politeness.It discusses the communicative effects of ritual politeness from the perspective of content mismatching,token empathy and pragmatic failure.By using quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis,this thesis systematically utilizes Ant Conc(quantitative)and Nvivo(qualitative)software to analyze the ritual politeness in commercial email replies.Four hundred twelve authentic Chinese and foreign commercial emails and 315 valid emails were collected,divided into two groups: customer service representative and customer.The former consists of 151 emails from Chinese business customer service,while the latter comprises 164 emails sent by customers from Europe and America.First of all,the results show that the ritual utterances are mainly expressed in the“greeting& complimentary close,request,apology,and acknowledgement” in commercial email replies.They may implement genuine politeness or may not achieve fundamental communicative purposes,in which seemingly polite expressions are impolite and represented as mock politeness.Nevertheless,we cannot simply classify them as polite or impolite expressions,and we need to judge whether they are polite or not based on the real communicating effects of the emails.Additionally,ritual politeness is manifested in three aspects: content mismatching,token empathy and pragmatic failure.Content mismatching can be divided into Q&A mismatching,attitude mismatching,and emotion mismatching.As a result,the author considers that ritual politeness,as the middle zone of the continuum of politeness and impoliteness in most cases,appears to be friendly on the surface but damages the face and interests of the target recipient.However,it can play a positive role in avoiding problems,building identity,and maintaining harmony when properly used.In a nutshell,this research enables customers engaged in cross-cultural business replies to apply politeness strategies to communicate better when writing emails and promote the successful realization of communication,which can help establish their image.Besides,it can help scholars better understand the importance of polite ritual utterances in commercial email replies and improve communication skills.At the same time,it is also hoped that this research can provide theoretical reference and practical guidance for most foreign trade practitioners and English language learners.