Schrijfpraktijk in zakelijke brieven. Een vergelijkende studie van de hantering van beleefdheitsstrategieen in Poolse, Nederlandse en Vlaamse direct-mailbrieven

Abstrakt

This contribution reports on an investigation of the handling of politeness strategies in Polish, Flemish and Dutch direct mail letters. The research is situated within the domain of pragmalinguistics and aims to enhance the communicative and pragmatic competence of Polish native-speakers who are dealing with the writing or translating of this type of letters from or to Dutch and vice versa. It provides insights into how this medium is being used to communicate with potential customers. Accordingly, the central research question has been formulated as follows: How do Dutch, Polish and Flemish people deal with politeness strategies in their direct mail letters? In order to provide an answer to this question, a corpus analysis of 218 traditional direct mail letters classified into three categories on the basis of their purpose and content has been performed using the politeness theory of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levison.