Chapter One Introduction
With the fast pace of economic booming era, international business in today’sworld plays a significant role and pushes a driving force in human civilization. Since theinternational business activities rely on the successful exchange of information, theessential communicative skills are recognized as the key points by all the businesscommunities. In terms of the information transmission, there has been a large number ofcommunicative ways of negotiating business, such as business facsimile, telephone on-line, business visit, face-to-face bargaining and business letters. So, selecting one of thebest ways of communication has been a heated topic among many people. This chaptercan be divided into four parts: firstly introducing the research background; secondlystating the significance of the study; thirdly putting forward the research questions;finally designing the steps of studying. With the fast pace of economic booming era, international business in today’sworld plays a significant role and pushes a driving force in human civilization. Since theinternational business activities rely on the successful exchange of information, theessential communicative skills are recognized as the key points by all the businesscommunities. In terms of the information transmission, there has been a large number ofcommunicative ways of negotiating business, such as business facsimile, telephone on-line, business visit, face-to-face bargaining and business letters. So, selecting one of thebest ways of communication has been a heated topic among many people. It is regardedthat business languages within the written or the oral form should not only be the toolsfor the two parties involved but also the evidence to achieve their mutual benefits in theprocess of the negotiation in order to avoid the tough possible problems in a very strictand formal way. Meanwhile, business letters, among the above tools of communication,remain an indispensable part in the exchanging of business information in differentnations. Including selling products and doing services, making a request and answeringthe inquiries, maintaining public relations and sorting the various business data,business letters never fail to set up the goodwill between clients, creditors, suppliers,and other public groups. English, as the world universal language, nowadays has beenan effective and proper way to achieve a business goal in both oral and written communication. Thus, how to use this language to promote and negotiate becomes aheated topic in the study of discourse analysis.While receiving the messages, the letter receivers are not always showing thevery satisfying attitudes to the contents owing to the delaying of the letters delivered insuch a long distance and the possibilities of receiving bad news sometimes, so scholarsconclude several key points in the commercial intercourse, which are relevant withsome characteristics of those letters, like politeness, properness and accurateness toexpress clear and concise meaning. Also, it is not too hard to understand that writing ina polite way and walking in others’ shoes to show the writers’ respect and theirconsiderable understanding contributes to the passing on of the information, and thatselecting proper words, phrases and sentence patterns to state accurately straight to thepoint is another way to maintain sound relationship among letter senders and letterreceivers. To attain this, some writing techniques are expected to be used when themessages are sent to their counterparts.Because of the communicative skills included, business English letters are beingpaid too much attention among a large number of scholars both at home and abroad, andthey make great efforts to search all the possible meanings contained in this corpus,especially the interpersonal meaning from the deep structure instead of that from thesurface structure only.According to the systemic functional grammar, Halliday (1985) applied with asystemic-fu
