ANALYSIS OF REQUEST EXPRESSION IN BUSINESS CHINESE EMAIL (CASE STUDY ON SPECIFIC CONTEXT)

Juliana Juliana, Ovilia Jessica

Abstract


With the expansion of technology and the Internet, email has played a major role in business or the workplace as a written communication tool. The most common communicative functions in email are notifications, requests, and commands. Making a request is basically in favor of the speaker, so it has a forceful tone. In order to make the other party willing to accept, the speaker can generally choose the request strategy that is most suitable for the scene according to the degree of directness and tone. Therefore, according to the purpose of this study, send a business email to make a request in a specific context to know the expression of the request used. The research objects of this study are Indonesian native speakers, and six business scenarios are designed through the open-ended Discourse Completion Test (DCT), from which 90 business Chinese emails are collected. A mixed methods study was conducted to explore the strategies used by Indonesian native speaker employees when making requests. After classification and analysis, the research results obtained by the author are: most of the request strategies in business Chinese emails written by Indonesian native speakers are direct imperative sentences, accounting for 85.5% of the total. When making a request, they often use some internal restraints to lessen the imposition of the request, the most common being "interrogative sentences" and "expressing politeness".


Keywords


Requests; Business Emails

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