Requests and status in business correspondence

The purpose of this study is the identification of possible linguistic variations in business correspondence containing requests which are attributable to the influence of the interpersonal variables of power, social distance, imposition and, in particular, status. In order to minimise interference from personality traits, a set of 32 authentic texts written by or to the same managing director of a joint-venture were selected from a larger corpus of over 200 documents containing requests. Syntactic, lexical and structural variations have been found between two main text-types of documents, relational and routine correspondence. Moreover, the varying pattern of influence of interpersonal variables seems to support a non-additive model of politeness as proposed by Holtgraves and Yang (1992).