Category of politeness in Russian and German business correspondence

Abstract

Politeness is an integral part of any communication — it acts as a regulator of the communicative process in different spheres of human activity. This category is particularly significant in the official communication, where careful selection of language means is necessary. The actual study of politeness in the official and business communication styles is presented in a contrastive aspect, comparing national-cultural peculiarities of politeness in different countries. Therefore, the novelty of this article lies in the comparative analysis of business letters in German and Russian and in the study of the means of politeness expression in separate communicative blocks as well. This study is structured considering modern trends in the development of conventional norms of official communication, the processes of their personalization, democratization, dialogization and individualization. The textbooks on business correspondence published in Germany and Russia are used as material. In addition, this article uses contextual and semantic analysis. The authors for the first time resort to the method of rubricating business letters into communicative blocks, identifying verbal means of politeness expression. As a result, differences between the analyzed types of German and Russian business letters were identified not only in the manifestation of the above-mentioned trends, but also in the representation of politeness expression in each of the communicative blocks. The results reveal socio-cultural specificity of these texts in German and Russian correspondence, which allows us to use them in teaching native and foreign language for business communication, as well as in the process of teaching translation.