Interpersonal strategies in international business emails: The intercultural pragmatics perspective

IF 1.8 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Intercultural Pragmatics Pub Date : 2023-11-01 DOI:10.1515/ip-2023-5004

Ping Liu, Huiying Liu

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract Business email has a significant impact on commercial activities and organizational image. Intercultural pragmatics is the new development of pragmatics, moving its focus from mono-cultural communication to multi-cultural communication, aiming to describe how communicators seek, activate, and create common ground to complete tasks in intercultural communication contexts. Drawing on 1,477 separate English emails exchanged between a Chinese auto parts export company and its business partners in different parts of the world, we find, from the intercultural pragmatics perspective, that different types of interpersonal strategies, i.e., alliance building, other-caring, and self-enhancing/defending, are employed to construct virtual intimacy and to create and highlight interpersonal relationship dimensions in international business communication. These strategies are intended to facilitate the accomplishment of communication tasks by creating emergent common ground, reflecting the dynamics and interculturality of business communication. This research deepens our understanding of the mechanism of relationship management in international business communication.

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国际商务电子邮件中的人际策略:跨文化语用学视角

商务电子邮件对商业活动和组织形象有着重要的影响。跨文化语用学是语用学的新发展，它将研究的重点从单文化交际转向多文化交际，旨在描述交际者如何在跨文化交际语境中寻找、激活和创造共同点来完成任务。本文从跨文化语用学的角度分析了中国某汽车零部件出口公司与世界各地商业伙伴之间的1477封独立的英文邮件，发现在国际商务沟通中，不同类型的人际关系策略(联盟构建、他人关怀、自我提升/防御)被用于构建虚拟亲密关系，并创造和突出人际关系维度。这些策略旨在通过创造紧急的共同点来促进沟通任务的完成，反映了商务沟通的动态性和跨文化性。本研究加深了我们对国际商务沟通中关系管理机制的理解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Intercultural Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.10

自引率

36.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： Intercultural Pragmatics is a fully peer-reviewed forum for theoretical and applied pragmatics research. The goal of the journal is to promote the development and understanding of pragmatic theory and intercultural competence by publishing research that focuses on general theoretical issues, more than one language and culture, or varieties of one language. Intercultural Pragmatics encourages ‘interculturality’ both within the discipline and in pragmatic research. It supports interaction and scholarly debate between researchers representing different subfields of pragmatics including the linguistic, cognitive, social, and interlanguage paradigms. The intercultural perspective is relevant not only to each line of research within pragmatics but also extends to several other disciplines such as anthropology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology, communication, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and bi- and multilingualism. Intercultural Pragmatics makes a special effort to cross disciplinary boundaries. What we primarily look for is innovative approaches and ideas that do not always fit into existing paradigms, and lead to new ways of thinking about language. Intercultural Pragmatics has always encouraged the publication of theoretical papers including linguistic and philosophical pragmatics that are very important for research in intercultural pragmatics.