Genre Analysis In The Setting Of English Business Letters

Since the day of Aristotle, genre has long been a term closely related to literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. Before 1960s, linguists as a whole had paid little attention to it, but the popularity of functionalism and discourse analysis afterwards has gradually turned it into a subject of interest in the domain of linguistics. Linguists of various schools strive to redefine the term and reposition it in their own theories. Among them, four schools attract considerable attention---Sydney School, ESP School, New Rhetoric School and The Activity Theory View of Genre.Based on a critical review of diverse definitions of genre and major genre theories, this dissertation holds that genre is a social and cultural communicative event among the members of a discourse community who hold shared expectations about the tools employed and conventions followed in the event. It is dynamic rather than static, functional rather than formal, resource-dependent rather than structure-dependent, contextualized rather than decontextualized, probabilistic rather than fixed. An analysis of major genre theories shows that they could be largely categorized into two camps--- the text-oriented one and the situation-oriented one. The former, which consists of Sydney School and ESP School, attaches more importance to generic moves and linguistic features (both at the textual level and at lexico-grammatical level) while the latter which is represented by New Rhetoric School highlights the role of social context in the evolution of a genre, especially the interaction between ideology of the members of a discourse community and the function of a genre. The Activity Theory View of Genre, which is developed from New Rhetoric School and The Activity Theory, draws people's attention to the role of tools in shaping genre and the interactions between genres. By assimilating the merits of the above theories, this dissertation puts forward a new framework for genre analysis, which is later applied to the analysis of English business letters. The new framework is set in a particular discourse community and composed of two perspectives---the diachronic one and the synchronic one. A diachronic study of genre helps us to observe the dynamic, probabilistic, resource-dependent nature of genre from a socio-historical vantage while a synchronic study of genre enables us to examine how a particular genre is realized in language (texts), especially how a particular genre enforces linguistic restrictions in terms of macro-structure, lexis, and grammar.To test its effectiveness, the proposed framework is applied to the analysis of English business letters, which produces fruitful results. Genre analysis of English business letters from the diachronic perspective indicates that English business letters as a genre have experienced a process of emergence, evolution, establishment, diversification and mixture, each period triggered by the changes in social context. Genre analysis of sales genre---a sub-genre of business letters from the synchronic perspective proves that texts of a genre share both physical and linguistic features, which in turn can be accounted for by the communicative purposes the genre intends to achieve.To sum up, the significance of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. First, genre is considered to be a social and cultural communicative event among the members of a discourse community who hold shared expectations about the tools employed and the conventions followed in the event. Second, a new framework for genre analysis is proposed, which combines the two perspectives into one model, thus remedying the defects of genre theories discussed above. Third, the new framework is adopted in the analysis of English business letters to demonstrate its validity. Fourth, genre analysis of English business letters has implications for the teaching of business communication in that it shows learning of genres in English business communication is not a mechanical imitation of pre-determined structures but rather a process of meaning choices and socialization.