Strategic Use Of Politeness In EFL Business Writings--A Cross-sectional Study

Being viewed as one of the major social constraints on human interaction, politeness has given impetus to decades of researches in pragmatics. Based on politeness theories of either Lakoff, Leech, or Brown and Levinson, a large body of studies has been devoted to this topic, investigating various politeness strategies available for performance of a certain type of linguistic action in a speech community, or cross-culture difference embodied in the application of specific strategies or in the concept of politeness. These researches, however, mainly work with conversations and few of them view linguistic politeness diachromcally in EFL context by giving attention to the individual difference of strategy user in terms of language proficiency development. The present study, inspired by previous literature, then ventures to explore linguistic politeness embodied in the written discourse of business letters. By way of quantitative and qualitative analysis, it tries to describe the strategic patterns of politeness application by EFL learners in business writings and in addition, to account for the intrinsic relationship between EFL proficiency and politeness application in a cross-sectional way, aiming to provide some useful clues for the teaching of business writing for EFL learners. Moreover, with its findings supporting the universality of politeness strategies, the present study further argues that while writing does not involve face to face contact, it is a form of interaction and the basic framework for the analysis of politeness can be extended to written texts.