Politeness Strategies in Pakistani Business English Letters

Abstract

The present study explores the politeness strategies used in Pakistani business letters written in English. It benefits from both the qualitative and quantitative approaches of research. A specialized corpus, ‘Pakistani Business English Letters’ (PBEL), has been compiled from business correspondence. PBEL consists of 1000 Pakistani business English letters collected from government and semi-government institutes e.g. banks, universities, private companies, factories etc in 2011. This study investigates the differences between Pakistani and American ways of using politeness strategies in external parts of business letters e.g. Opening and Closing of the letter. The Brown and Levinson (1987) model of politeness strategies has been adapted in the present research. The software ANTCONC 3.2.4 has been used as research tool in this study to calculate the frequent politeness strategies used in Pakistani Business English letters. This study is very insightful for teachers and learners regarding the usage of politeness strategies in business communication. The textbook writers can benefit from this research as it will acquaint them with the differences in the use of politeness strategies for intra-national and international business communication.