The pragmatics of letter‐writing

Abstract

This paper focuses on personal letter‐writing as a mode of communication between an L2 writer and an L1 reader, a little explored discourse type, yet particularly vital and salient in the process of language teaching and learning. The corpus is composed of 120 personal letters. They are supposed to be written to British English native speakers. The data were analyzed and discussed in the light of the theoretical insights of a number of modern linguists, notably Grice's Cooperative Principle and Leech's Principle of Politeness as well as Brown and Levinson's views of politeness strategies. The main objective of the study is to examine the corpus of letters in terms of the sociocultural background of the writers, that is, to establish interpretive links between the type of material collected and its situational and cultural context. As a non‐nativized variety of English, the language used by the students exhibits certain peculiarities likely to be the result of contradiction between two different cultures. The major argument therefore developed in this study is that these peculiarities can be seen as “errors” which are the by‐product of incomplete understanding of the sociocultural background of the target language.