Modal verbs indicating politeness in business correspondence

Abstract

Politeness theory proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) is supposed to be universally valid for every culture and language. It is generally acknowledged that language is not only an instrument for communicating information, it also marks identity, helps establish and maintain social relationships. Naturally, politeness plays an essential role in international business writing as well. The appropriate use of polite forms is particularly effective, practical and necessary in business letters and can lead to either to business success or its failure.The paper aims to focus on the use of modal verbs in business correspondence. The practical part is focused on the analysis of the modal verbs in samples of business correspondence. In the presented paper the use of modal verbs in a corpus of 47 English business letters written by II year (B2 level) Georgian non-native students is analyzed. It may serve as a resource of linguistic realizations of politeness in English to native speakers of other languages.