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Pragmatics, "Situated" Language, and Business Communication

The first part of this article identifies several variables from speech act theory and conversation analysis that might be applied to the study of business com munication. Recent work on politeness (by R. Lakoff, and Brown and Levinson) is found to be particularly relevant and useful. The second part of the article presents an exploratory study that examines several business let ters in order to see how principles derived from linguistic studies of politeness might advance the methodology used in business-communication research. The study indicates that theoretical work on politeness provides useful tools for analysing written discourse in business environments.