Abstract

With the popularity and frequency of e-business activities, e-business instant communication plays an increasingly important role in e-business, and the appropriate and reasonable use of business language usually directly influences the economic interests. Therefore, the present study takes politeness principle as the theoretical framework and the participants’ chat records of e-business instant communication as the research data, and adopts the methodologies of discourse analysis and interview to explore the language use in e-business activities from the perspective of politeness principle. And the present study finds that servicers and customers use different linguistic resources from the perspective of politeness principle out of different interest pursuit. More specifically, servicers strictly observe the six maxims having no violations in e-business instant communication, while customers go against Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim and Modesty Maxim and usually comply with Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim, nevertheless, they violate Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim on special occasion in e-business instant communication. What’s more, if customers can strictly observe Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim, and servicers can study how to avoid and deal with customers’ violation to Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim successfully, enterprises, servicers and customers will benefit.

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