The Pragmatic Function of Vague Language in Business Letters Guided by the Relevance Theory

Abstract

Trade between China and foreign countries is increasingly frequent. As the medium of communication, business letters are playing a more and more important role in trading. It is easy to find that vague language is widely used in business letters. The successful use of vague language requires the recipient to be able to infer the writer’s intention correctly. This paper takes business letters collected online and offline as corpus, and will analyze the vague language from two aspects, that is, lexical aspect and syntactic aspect. Based on the analysis finally summarize the three main pragmatic functions of vague language in business letters, namely intent expression, self-protection and politeness.