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Morten Pilegaard argues that “politeness strategy has both positive and negative responses. The positive politeness strategy in establishing business relations and making agreement on trade affairs decide the rights and obligations of the contract between the seller and the buyer. And it also Shows that the relevant person replies to letters of foreign trade carefully, timely and in detail. Negative politeness strategy is used in the face of the bargaining, processing, compensation, etc” (1997: 223-244).来~自^751论+文.网www.751com.cn/
Tang Jianfeng (2011: 37-38), puts forward seven Cs principles on business English correspondence in the enquiry and offer: Completeness, guarantee letter with integrated information; Concreteness, in view of the specific trade information; Clearness, clearly express their own views; Conciseness, maintain a clear and concise style; Courtesy, pay attention to polite language; Consideration, the perspective-taking attitude; Correctness, ensure language correctly. Under the condition of correctly following the principles, it will be helpful for foreign trade to run smoothly and keep the development of foreign trade business.
Literature shows that most of the studied on business English correspondence are done from the perspective of writing principles and few are from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. Therefore, this thesis aims to study business English correspondence from this new perspective, which will be a significant addition to the literature of the study on business English correspondence.
3 Theoretical Framework-Attitude System
In Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), Halliday (2000) studies three meta-functions of language: ideational, interpersonal and textual. One complete and systemic way to study interpersonal meaning is to study appraisal language. According to Thompson (2008:75), “appraisal is a central part of the meaning of any text and that any analysis of the interpersonal meaning of a text must take it into account”. The Appraisal Theory put forward by Martin in 1990s aims to study appraisal language in the text, which is a new framework based on the study of interpersonal meaning of the discourse in a more systemic way. It explores the lexical items with evaluation to investigate interpersonal meaning and find out the language user’s viewpiont, standpiont and attitude towards the things, human beings, objects and states of affairs, etc.
This study is carried out under the framework of Attitude system-one of the three sub-categories of Appraisal Theory. Attitude system can be sub-categorized into Affect, Judgment and Appreciation, and thus this chapter will elaborate on these sub-categories.