A Genre Analytic Approach To English Introduction Discourse Of Well-known Corporations In Shandong Province

With China's entry into WTO, external exchanges have extended into the whole society as well as all fields of science and the economy. Since many companies are being targeted at international markets, there is a lot more competition at home and abroad, and it is much fiercer. Under these circumstances, China should actively open up to the outside world and participate in more global economic activities. Thus, as the primary and direct communication channel between corporations and the customers, English introductions to corporations play a major role in publicizing corporations'products and services to the customers. As the primary means of external communication, English introductions may result in the success or failure of the business transactions. It is believed that only when a writer has composed a good text, can he achieve his purpose effectively. That explains why business discourse has received more and more attention from linguists of various disciplines.The author in this study intends to find out the communicative patterns of the business promotional genre by elaborating on move structures and dealing with linguistic features of this promotional discourse. Genre analysis goes beyond the surface-level description of language; rather, it attempts to interpret the deep-level rationale of discourse construction, examines the social and cognitive factors behind discourse structure, and reveals the special form of realization of communicative purposes and the regularity of discourse construction.Increasing attention has been given to the concept of genre in a range of fields over recent years. Using the genre approach, some scholars have done valuable research using the genre approach. In addition, they attempt to offer deeper explanations of the form-function correlation, providing answers to such questions as"Why is a particular text (genre) written the way it is?"or"why do members of specific discourse communities use the language the way they do?"(Bhatia, 1993:11) The answer requires input not only from linguistics alone, but also from sociology, psychology, studies of disciplinary cultures and insights from members of such discourse communities. Another important field, ESP, should not be neglected. Over the past 20 years, a large number of studies in the ESP have been devoted to research article (RA) in academic writing. Compared with a large number of studies on RA in academic writing, the amount of genre-based researches focusing on business settings and advertisements are rather limited.And according to Bhatia(1993), advertisements( including newspapers, magazines, broadcasting and on TV), introductions to new books and leaflets are all attributed to the promotional genre. English introductions are a kind of advertisement publicity literature, addressed to a selected group of prospective customers in order to inform them of the company products or services and to try to persuade them to purchase. And the purposes of writing English introductions are to propagandize the achievements, the long history and the production ability of the company, to impress upon consumers that the company has a well-established reputation, to establish credibility and to promote a good image of the company. Thus, the focus of this study is to find the communicative pattern, discourse structure, stylistic features and language features of the promotional genre. As to the samples of promotional advertisements, most of the previous studies are focused on newspaper, magazine, broadcasting and TV, while take the internet into account, even though it is another important medium. For this paper, just by internet, the data were collected from 25 Shandong corporations'English introductions for analysis. By the theories of Bhatia's seven moves and Hasan's GSP, a constructive genre-based move structure and the writer's choices of obligatory and optional moves are elaborated. Then we go to a lower level of analysis, where we deal with the language features in constructing moves.In summary, by focusing on English introductions'special discourse patterns and language features in the promotional genre, the study attempts to provide insights into ESP teaching, including implications for reading, writing and translating English introduction discourse.