Politeness in English and Italian Business Discourse: Contrasting Strategies and Textualisations

The claimed universality of politeness theory has been challenged by non-Western scholars (cf. Watts et al. 1992; Kasper 1990), who argue that face is less of a psychological than a cultural factor. But Brown and Levinson’s model still provides a powerful tool for analysing conversation and, as first observed by Myers (1989), also many types of written text. The potential impact of certain illocutionary acts within a given cultural setting is a function of the social distance and relative power of the parties involved. Hence the institutional nature of business correspondence, with the writer always acting on behalf of an impersonal organisation, accounts for the first variable; market forces account for the latter, usually placing the seller or debtor in a weaker position. This explains the “formal tone” generally adopted in such texts. This paper investigates the occurrence of politeness-oriented devices and their linguistic realisations in a small corpus of authentic English and Italian business letters, integrated with examples and guidelines taken from a number of L2 and L1 handbooks. A qualitative discussion follows of the recurring features within each language, with a contrastive assessment of inherent sociopragmatic constraints.