language used in business response letters in terms of speech acts and politeness strategies

Abstract

The principle objectives of this research are to figure out the types of speech acts and politeness strategies used as well as their frequency in business response letters. From that, the effects of the speech acts and politeness strategies in conveying the Writers’ messages are analyzed. The research method involved observation of document. 50 business response letters were collected base on three criteria which are form, language and length. The data analysis showed that there are four types of speech acts used in those letters which were representatives, directives, expressives and commissives. Among these types, representative speech act is used the most frequently. In additions, positive and negative politeness strategies are applied in all collected data. Between two types of strategies, the frequency of negative ones overwhemed. Although the research was conducted seriously and carefully, limitations were inevitable. Since the limitation of data sources, the researcher could not enlarge the scale. Due to the small number of samples, generalization was far from being achieved. Besides, the number of native and non-native English writers was not big enough to make any comparision between speech acts or politeness strategies used by two groups. Therefore, the researcher would like to call for further research on a larger scale and to consider the differences in two groups of writer.