A Pragmatic Study Of Address Forms In Cross-cultural Business Communications

Address forms always appear at the start of a conversation. It decides whether this conversation is successful or not. There are many studies on address forms throughout history. The earliest study of address forms was initiated by Brown and Gilman from the sociolinguistic perspective. From then on, the researches about address have flourished. Nowadays, more and more researchers begin to analyze it from different angles on the basis of different theories. Commonly, previous researches believe that address forms are static. In fact, the choice and usage of address form are not stable. However, this thesis takes social deictic functions and Politeness Principles as the theoretical foundations to study the dynamic use of address forms, especially the address forms in cross-cultural business communications.The social deictic functions of address forms contain the identity deictic function, the interpersonal deictic function and the emotional deictic function. Identity deictic function refers to the role of the participants in communications. Interpersonal deictic function means the psychological relationship between participants. And the emotional deictic function can be classified as the positive emotion and the negative emotion. A positive emotion gives favorable attitudes, including encouragement, happiness, praise and gratitude, while a negative emotion stands in the opposite shoe, containing anger, threat, and satire. The social deictic functions of address forms not only reveal the listener’s identity but also indicate his/her emotion.Politeness Principles are proposed by Leech as the supplement of Grice’s Cooperative Principle. It has six notions, namely tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, agreement maxim and sympathy maxim. Tact Maxim means to minimize cost to others or to maximize benefit to others. Generosity maxim is to minimize benefit to one’s self or to maximize cost to one’s self. Approbation maxim is to minimize dispraise of others or to maximize praise of others. Modesty maxim is to minimize praise of one’s self or to maximize dispraise of one’s self. Agreement maxim means to minimize disagreement between one’s self and others or to maximize agreement between one’s self and others. Sympathy maxim means to minimize antipathy between one’s self and other or to maximize sympathy between one’s self and others. In a word, Politeness Principles play an important role in cross-cultural communications. Most address forms confirm to the rules of the maxims of this principle, such as "Qin" in Taobao Style, which will be explained in detail in this paper.This thesis tries to analyze the dynamics of address forms, which refers to the adaptation to different situations, fulfillment of various communicative needs and findings about its flexibility. It also hopes to analyze data collected about the using habit of address forms in business communications to provide guidance in cross-cultural communications as well as teachings.This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction part. It introduces the background, significance, aims of the study and the overall thesis structure. Chapter Two reviews some previous studies from the pragmatic perspective, focusing on the static features of address forms. It gives some definitions about and classifications of address forms. Although there are various opinons, this paper just chooses one relatively comprehensive definition and classification to study:in this paper, address form is "the correct title of name that you use for someone when you are speaking to them" and they are classified into six types:kinship titles, occupational titles, despicable titles, common titles, zero titles and names. Chapter Three mainly explains the theoretical framework of the thesis, which consists of two sections—social deictic functions and Politeness Principles. Chapter Four deals with the research methodology. This paper makes the use of both qualitative analysis and quantative analysis. For the former one, it studies address forms based on existing theories and data. For the latter one, it gets new data and results through a questionnaire did by50foreigners living in China now. The data collected were handled by Excel and SPSS softwares. And the results reflected their using habit of address forms when doing e-business, which is a quite popular way in modern business. Chapter Five discusses results of the research and provides detailed analysis of the address forms from the pragmatic perspective on the basis of social deicitc functions and Politeness Principles. In this chapter, new address form "Qin" will be futher studied. Chapter Six is the conclusion part of the thesis. It first sums up the major findings of the study and then lists the implications. Finnally, the limitations and suggestions are discussed for further researches.In intercultural contexts, especially in business circles, a correct understanding and usage of address forms are of vital importance. Proper choices of address forms depend on many factors, which can be learned through the understanding of theories of the social deictic functions and Politeness Principles. Ignorance of the factors stated above will inevitably lead to communicative breakdowns, whereas the proper learning in the usage of address forms will be very helpful in achieving social communication goals. The study aims to provide guidance in English teaching and business communicaiton.Finally, it’s hopeful that the findings of this study could make some contributions to researchers who will conduct studies in this field.