A Study On Pragmatic Strategies Of The Speech Acts In English Business Letters Of Claims

The claim letters undoubtedly play a key role in the foreign trading as an important part of business correspondence in international trading activities.The essence of letters of claims is to achieve the purpose of behavior through language. The aim of a claim letter is to seek a better and quick solution as soon as possible when the problems have emerged.It is usually caused by the buyer who received the goods as a result of dissatisfaction so they write the claim letters,such as:the goods didn't arrive on time;although the goods arrived,they had different set of orders from description;there are damaged goods;the number of shortage or surplus goods;the quality of the goods doesn't match the samples;the services expenses are unreasonable or charges are too high.Therefore,an effective claim letter depends on various linguistic realizations and the communicative purpose of different speech act has to be achieved through different linguistic strategies.From 1970s,linguists pay much attention to how to use language in business correspondence.While linguists, stylistic scientists and conversation analysts analyze business correspondence with the characteristics of language,style and characteristics of the discourse features from different point of views of the language,but the analysis of the letter claims have not been given sufficient attention。Based on Austin and Searle's speech act theory,both qualitative and quantitative methods will be adopted.This thesis supplies a brief introduction to the types and functions of claim letters and an analysis of linguistic features of different speech acts. So we can connect these letters forms,structure,and actual function with the aim of communication.It attempts to investigate how various syntactical and lexical means are used effectively in the writing of English claim letters to achieve the communicative purpose,lodging a claim courteously,and in turn to promote the foreign trading as expected.In this study a corpus of 80 English business letters of claims are analyzed according to Searle's typology of speech acts.All the five types of speech acts including assertives,directives,commissives,expressives,and declarations occur in English business letters of claims.Among them assertives and directives are the two most frequently used speech acts.Every speech act has its own language strategies.Through the process of analyzing,we can give some advices to business persons such as writing methods,reasonable rules,and help them to use polite language and tactics appropriately in different speech acts in order to create a harmonious and cooperative relation,thus preventing and resolving international trade conflicts and disputes,promote the smooth conduct of trade,and eventually realize a win-win trade.