Особенности составления и оформления деловых писем на английском языке

INTRODUCTION

The style of official documents aims at establishing, developing and controlling business relations between individuals and organizations. Being devoid of expressiveness, it is fully impersonal, rational and pragmatic. These characteristics find implementation in peculiar language forms.
At the graphical level this style is distinguished by specific rules of making inscriptions, using capital letters and abbreviations.
At the lexical level it is characterized by predominance of bookish vocabulary, professional terms and clichés, such as “aviso”, “interest - free”.
At the morphological level this style is described by use nonfinite forms of the verb and impersonal pronouns.
The syntactic level is distinguished by long and super-long sentences of all structural types, complicated by complexes of secondary predication, detachments, parenthetic insertions and passive constructions.
Nowadays English is the common language of inte
ational commercial communication. Despite of slight local differences in drafting business correspondence it should to be mentioned that most documents (price quotations, invoices, bills of lading, time drafts, letters of credit, packing lists, shipping and collection documents) have standard forms. The senders and the recipients of a letter often have a working relationship and share a common frame of reference; many of the language and cultural barriers that lead to misunderstandings have already been overcome. However, if communicants’ native language is not English, extra care should be taken to ensure success of business communication. Therefore studying of drafting business letters gains in importance.
Analyzing the level of theoretical knowledge in the field of business correspondence it is to be noted that many scientific studies were devoted to this problem. First of all works of I.V.A
old, I.R. Halperin, N.E.Enkvist, R.A. Budagov and many other linguists are to be mentioned.

CHAPTER 1. LEXICAL, GRAMMATICAL AND STYLISTIC PECULIARITIES OF BUSINESS LETTERS IN ENGLISH

1.1. Lexical peculiarities of business letters

The vocabulary of business correspondence is characterized by two basic principles:
1) high importance of the content expressed in commercial documents excludes any ambiguity,
2) business letters covers limited range of matters.
At the lexical level business correspondence is distinguished by use of special terms, clichés, abbreviations, phraseological combinations for opening and closing of a letter.
There are special words and phrases often used in business letters [1, p. 278]:
1. Whereas is used to introduce a comment which contrasts with what is said in the main clause, for example:
These fixed-price menus for two or three courses can cost as little as 50f, whereas the à la carte is always more expensive.
2. Hereinafter means “further on in this document”. “Hereinafter” frequently sets up abbreviated names for the contract parties, for example:
ABC ltd and CDE plc hereinafter referred to as “parties”
3. And/or means either or both of two stated possibilities. Occasionally the alte
atives become overwhelming, thus and/or is convenient and generally accepted, although more detail is better [17], for example:
Our company is pleased to supply you with audio and/or video components listed below.
4. Shall is commonly used in business correspondence to indicate that something must happen, usually because of a rule or law, for example:
The bank shall be entitled to debit the amount of such liability and all costs incurred in connection with it to your Account.
5. Confirm means to make a decision or an agreement formally valid? for example:
I’m writing to confirm our order.
6. Fu
ish means transact to deliver a variety of elements as a package, for example6
Last month we have fu
ished the bedrooms in a variety of styles
7. Subject to means dependent or conditional upon, for example:
The...

CONCLUSION

Our research work reflects all the necessary features and peculiarities of the correct business English in letters. The first point deals with the flexibility of style boundaries: the borders within which a style presumably functions are not rigid and allow various degrees of overlapping and melting into each other. It is not accidental that rather often we speak of intermediate cases such as the popular scientific style which combines the features of scientific and belles-lettres style, or the style of new jou
alism which is a combination of publicist, newspaper and belles-lettres style.
As our research work shows, the style of official documents preserves cast-iron forms of structuring and uses syntactical constructions and words long known as archaic and not observed anywhere else. Addressing documents and official letters, signing them, expressing the reasons and considerations leading to the subject of the document (letter) – all this is strictly regulated both lexically and syntactically. All emotiveness and subjective modality are completely banned out of the style.
L. Fedoriachenko investigated that skilled business writers for whom English is the native language write crisp, economical prose. By our standards and by standards of countries where English is a main but not native language, such style may seem blunt and terse. Translators into English would also probably use scholarly writing styles, employing longer sentences and painting more vivid pictures.
Now that English has become the leading language in inte
ational business communication, more and more people not only realize the necessity to read literature and write letters in English, but also feel the need to present their ideas and research results in this language – at inte
ational conferences, when applying for launching inte
ational projects. Our work offers a wide range of expressions, word combinations, phrases, speech patte
s characteristic of the English business style.