DISCOURSE ORGANIZATION AND POLITENESS STRATEGIES OF CORRESPONDENCE IN PHILIPPINE ENGLISH

Writing letters are the most traditional and common means to help people exchange information, maintain relationship, exchange and settle dispute. However, with the onset of the internet, letter writing is a “lost” art. Through this study, the researcher identified the significance of politeness strategies in correspondence as it comes out from works on pragmatics and illustrates different aspects, especially the language choices for expressing polite requests as well as writing courteous adjustments. The correspondence from the International Corpus of English in the Philippines (ICE-PHI) which includes 15 social letters and 15 business letters were analyzed using Bhatia’s (1993) model. The result showed that there were eleven 11 organizational moves found in the analysis of both social and business letters. The analysis also revealed that there were four obligatory moves that were present in both social and business letters. These moves are the following: conclude with pleasantries, solicit response, express gratitude, and introduce the cause. In terms of politeness strategies in the correspondence, current study was anchored on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) concept of politeness. The researcher concluded that the writers of both social and business letters were very particular in expressing positive face. The commonly used positive face tactics were: please the hearer, give reason, show interest, show concern, show appreciation, use of ellipses, pluralize the person responsible, the use of explicit term and euphemism. While the negative face tactics are the following: need to independent and free, hedge opinion, being indirect and seek agreement. Furthermore, the distance, equality and hesitancy of the correspondence was determined thru Lakoff’s rule of politeness. Rule 1 is realized once a sense of distance is created between the speaker and hearer by the speaker. In Rule 2 or Give Option which is “the rule of hesitancy”, the addressee has the choice to express doubt in his letter as part of the speech act. For Rule 3, the focus is on the rule of equality. In this rule, there is a balance status between the writer and addressee that makes the writer feels good in writing a letter.