| With the extreme development of international trade, business English correspondence plays an increasingly important role in international communication. As for business English correspondence, people always think that its language should be accurate and precise and avoid vagueness as far as possible, which is not the case, however. On the contrary, vague language is widely used in all kinds of business English correspondence.The concept Adaptation Theory was first put forward by Belgium linguist Verschueren in1987. According to Adaptation Theory, pragmatics is to take an overall view of language use from the perspectives of cognition, society and culture. And language use is a process of continuous linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal or language-external reasons. Adaptation Theory is based on the previous studies about vague language on all levels, which analyzes language in a more scientific and reasonable way and provides a totally new perspective for understanding and interpretation of pragmatics.The previous study on vague language in business English correspondence, compared with that in other areas, still seems not enough. Although there are a few scholars who have made a research on vague language in business English correspondence, almost all of them take Politeness Principles, Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory and Face Theory as their theoretical foundations to explore vague language itself in business English correspondence (such as pragmatic functions of vague language, employment frequency, etc.), rather than investigate the deeper and more essential things behind vague language (such as the reason why people use vague language). And there are even fewer people who can take advantage of Adaptation Theory to analyze this point of vague language in business English correspondence. What’s more, the study on vague language in business English correspondence based on Adaptation Theory done by just a few scholars is not comprehensive. They basically make an analysis of vague language’s adaptation to communicators’communicative intentions and psychological motivations (belonging to physical world), but neglect vague language’s adaptation to physical world and social world. As a result, the previous study on adaptability of vague language lacks of systematicness and comprehensiveness. Based on the above there points, the thesis takes a perspective of Adaptation Theory and uses qualitative and abductive methods to make a comprehensive and systematic analysis of vague language in business English correspondence from three aspects, namely, physical world, social world and mental world. It tries to seek for answers to the following points:(1) Employment situations of vague language in business English correspondence.(2) Linguistic realizations of vague language in business English correspondence.(3) How vague language realizes adaptation in business English correspondence.(4) What pragmatic effects vague language can achieve in business English correspondence.Through careful analysis of plenty of sample correspondence selected from the current authoritative text kooks of business English correspondence writing at home and abroad, conclusions can be reached as follows:(1) There are two types of employment situations of vague language in business English correspondence, namely, objectives situations and subjective situations. And the subjective situations are also divided into two groups:subjective inability and subjective reluctance.(2) Vague language in business English correspondence is realized by four means, namely, vague words, vague syntax, hedges and implication.(3) In business English correspondence vague language is the result of continuous linguistic choices and constant linguistic adaptation to physical world, social world and mental world (4) Vague language in business English correspondence achieves four pragmatic effects, that is, strengthening persuasiveness, enhancing flexibility, making expressions more polite and leaving a certain room for addressor. |
