SUGGESTION SPEECH STRATEGIES IN FRENCH BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE
This article defines the concepts of suggestion and speech strategy, as well as provides the examples of the use of suggestion speech strategies in French business correspondence. In addition, the authors characterize the suggestion speech strategy, stressing that one can «dissolve» the request in the structure of the French sentence instead of directly giving instructions to the interlocutor. The authors also consider the techniques of giving hidden commands to the interlocutor. The information that the communicant possesses before the communication act (upcoming speech communication; cognitive presuppositions; context) determine the choice of vocabulary and grammatical forms. The suggestion speech strategy is implemented in several ways: direct (imperative) and indirect, intentional and unintentional, and also involves the positions which the communicant should rely on (eliminating traces of judgment and personal assessment; more or less conscious choice of a certain position when arguing or choosing words by modalizing them; a distant position that would force a communicant to accept certain attitudes, relying on a neutral attitude of a specialist who can impartially analyze the subject of the conversation). Based on this, the purpose of this study is to analyze the speech strategies of suggestion in French business correspondence.