| With the expansion of economic activities on an international scale, English business correspondence became a dispensable part of business transactions. Business writing plays an important role in building and developing business relationships, cooperating with business partners, dealing with transactions, and maintaining goodwill. How to write an effective business correspondence becomes the primary concern.From the early 1970s, linguists have become increasingly interested in the language issue in business writings. The Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP) in pragmatics provide useful theoretical support for business correspondence writing. At the same time, under the guide of CP and PP, several writing strategies, such as"you-attitude"and"positive Emphasis", reflect those principles in business correspondence writing. The discussion of this paper puts the emphasis on how pragmatic principles are embodied in business correspondence writing and by which way they guide the writing.The relation between"you-attitude","positive emphasis"and CP, PP is explained in the paper. Pragmatic principles are conditional regulations and are interdepended on or collided with each other. Readers should act according to circumstances in the practical use. As peculiar pragmatic rules in business correspondence writing,"you-attitude"and"positive emphasis"embody the compatibility between CP and PP.The author classified the business correspondence after the introduction of its nature, function, etc. Business correspondence may be classified according to the content of the letter, function of the letter, nature of the information given or by its illocutionary act. The author adopts the last method. Leech classified illocutionary acts into four categories: convivial, collaborative,competitive and conflictive. Considering the different relations between their illocutionary acts and their social goals, business letters are classified into four types accordingly. The author illustrates the genre of these four types of business letters from the perspective of communicative purpose, discourse and language by using the genre analysis model, and further explains the writing strategies, such as"you-attitude", are applicable to business correspondence genre texts. Therefore, it would be helpful in writing business correspondence by applying these writing strategies correctly.The genre analysis model brings some new ideas to the paper. The modified genre analysis procedures select the core part of the original model proposed by Bhatia. More than a bridge that links pragmatic principles and business correspondence writing, genre analysis plays as a test method which explains the significant importance pragmatics plays in business correspondence writing to the readers from a clearer and more vivid perspective. |
