Publications

Publication details [#11888]

Yeung, Lorrita N.T. 1997. Polite Requests in English and Chinese Business Correspondence in Hong Kong. Journal of Pragmatics 27 (4) : 505–522. 18 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Person as a subject
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0378-2166

Annotation

Contrary to claims by Brown & Levinson, this research shows that imposition, social distance and relative power combined affect usage of polite requests in both corpora, that only imposition influences linguistic choice in English business correspondence while there is no significant effect with all three factors in the Chinese data. It is argued that definitional concept, discourse type and sociocultural issues account for these results.