Investigating Pragmatic Failures in Business Letters of Kazakhstani Professionals

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, the economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan has undergone considerable changes and development. As a consequence, many international business transactions are carried out between the representatives of different languages and cultures. This article focuses on pragmatic failures detected in the collected corpora of 100 business letters written in English by Kazakhstani business professionals to their international partners. A number of examples has been identified which clearly demonstrates noticeable discrepancy between cultural and linguistic contexts of speech units making communication process complicated. In the study, we have identified several reasons for pragmatic failures in communication through business correspondence including a mixture of different cultural standards of the structural and linguistic processing of business correspondence, a mixture of different genres in one business text with a combination of several communicative purposes, a lack of language skills of the authors of business letters in English (spelling, grammar, lexical errors), etc.