COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF POLITENESS STRATEGY DEPLOYED BY VIETNAMESE IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BUSINESS EMAILS

This thesis is determined to investigate emails messages as a mode of workplace communication of companies in Vietnam, involving participants in five business relationships, namely colleagues to colleagues, superiors to subordinates, subordinates to superiors, employees to partners, and employees to customers. The investigation was conducted within two corpora, including 100 business emails written in English and 100 business emails written in Vietnamese by Vietnamese employees of four companies in the northern of Vietnam. This study attempts to explore how politeness strategies were adopted differently in different languages and to address different addressees by drawing on speech act and politeness theories. In this research, speech act theory and email speech act taxonomy are used to identify the moves and motives of the gathered emails. The theory of Brown and Levinson (1987) is the framework for the detection and analysis of the politeness strategies employed in the messages. Potential factors that may impact the linguistic choices such as cultural norms and values, social distance, power and language were taken into account when comparing the two corpora and explaining the variance of the adoption of politeness strategies. The findings revealed that both English emails and Vietnamese emails use the similar quantity of politeness strategies. Although performing the same speech act functions, there is remarkable difference between the priorities of the sub-strategies. This variation is created by the hierarchy in the workplace, social distance, cultural background and language competence.