A Pragmatic Study On The Chinese Contribution Email

This paper attempts to analyze the speech act and its strategy of 370 Chinese contribution emailsfrom the pragmatic perspective. We regard this Chinese contribution email as a sequence ofspeech act.Firstly, we analyzed it from the structure aspect. A contribution email includes a subject, anappellation, the main text, and the signature.Secondly, we analyzed it from the speech act aspect, it is a combination of a series of speech acts,which are the acts of request, refer, introduce, praise, express wishes and boasts, express thanks.The core is the request speech act, other speech acts are the attachment, serving for the corerequest speech act.Thirdly, from the macrocosmic and microcosmic aspects, we analyzed how the request isrealized in Chinese contribution email, that is, the request strategy. In the macrocosmic aspect, ithas single request strategy and combined speech act strategy. We analyzed 13 combinedstrategies in detail. In the microcosmic aspect, it has five strategies about degrading oneselfwhile respecting others, strengthening request act force, easing up request act force, hedges, andpragmatic empathy. These strategies are not at will, which have certain regularity. Meanwhile,we present the data analyses and findings about the distributing of macrocosmic strategy, namely,the speech act combination. And we discuss the findings of the study.Furthermore, the study shows that the Chinese contribution email has both written language andconversational language features, which has a flexible format. And the biggest feature ofcontribution email is the indirect the content of request.