Cross-cultural Discourse Analysis: A Genre-based Analysis Of Sales Promotion Letters

This thesis compares the rhetorical moves as well as the specific linguistic features used in English and Chinese sales letters from social, cross-cultural and pragmatic perspectives with an aim to propose an explanatory framework for teaching cross-cultural genres and other relevant business genres. It is the overall objective to study the rhetorical moves of a representative sample of texts in order to determine whether they display specific differences which can be ascribed to their social and cultural environments.An approach based on genre study (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993) and schema theory (Barlett, 1932; Rumelhart, 1980) is used to explore the communicative purposes and various levels of the text. Hall's (1977) high-and low-context cultures and politeness theory in cross-cultural pragmatics have also been incorporated to enrich the genre approach.Based on the rhetorical analysis of moves following Bhatia (1993), a corpus of sixty sales letters (thirty in Chinese and thirty in English) has been examined. Differences in communication patterns between these letters were identified, and shown to be largely due to a number of factors such as the specific values and beliefs of each culture and the different business practice in China. Major cross-cultural differences include the functions of the opening move, the use of headline and postscript, the use of introductory move and greetings, and politeness strategies. These findings are worth noting for better understanding of business communication across cultures and the development in teaching cross-cultural genres to learners.The explanatory framework proposed for teaching cross-cultural sales genres in this study is not intended to contradict findings of previous research, but rather to incorporate the results of previous studies into a more comprehensible framework for the interpretation of cross-cultural sales genre writing. It is the author's hope that this framework will facilitate further inquiry into the process of organizing cross-cultural context. The present research may help ESP practitioners with some insights into the use of the proposed explanatory framework in teaching international business writing, and it may contribute to the elaboration of the current approach to the study of sales genres and to the development of research methods for intercultural discourse studies.