Le discours de la francophonie

Oana Coşman – Investigating specialised discourse…findings indicate that politeness strategies are deployed to preparethe ground for the main goal of the letter, to redress the potentiallyface-threatening act of requesting something from the clientand to close the letter. While both positive and negative politenessstrategies are frequent in the early stages of the letter to assertcommonality and togetherness, negative politeness strategies arepredominant once negotiation has commenced, with the purposeof redressing face-threat. Furthermore, she suggests that politenessresults not only from the use of individual politenessstrategies at the sentence level, but rather from a number ofillocutionary acts 'intricately wound together' in the text. Pilegaard(1997) notes that “in written texts the linguistic expressionsof politeness are not only the primary vehicles of politeness, theyare the only ones”. (Pilegaard, 1997:240).To sum up, the studies discussed above suggest that in comparisonto native speakers, non-native speakers of English oftenpresent some differences in the way requests and politeness arerealized in business contexts. Thus, it seems that when writingEnglish business texts, traces of the writer’s mother tongue willlikely remain in the text as is pointed out by Connor (1996: 135–143). 10 ConclusionThis article has examined business discourse as specialiseddiscourse. We have reviewed one essential component of linguisticcompetence, politeness, using Brown and Levinson's(1987) model of politeness strategies because of its interactionalapproach to the issue of politeness. The article has also madereference to the linguistic realization of positive and negative politenessstrategies in business correspondence. The aim was togain a greater understanding of the ways in which politenessaffects and has bearing on the linguistic and rhetoric forms withinthe business discourse.10 U. Connor (1996), Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-cultural Aspects of SecondLanguage Writing, Cambridge University Press, UK.60