Genre Analysis: Business Letters

As one of the recently established, debatable and yet at least defined as interdisciplinary domains in linguistics, genre analysis, which take genre text as the analyzing focus, has moved from a surface-level description to a deep-level explanation. This dissertation is intended to propose an analyzing model that can be applied in genre text analysis to work out form-function correlation in business written discourse.To supply a theoretical background for the analysis and application of the model, the dissertation first makes an overview of the development of genre analysis theories and models. The process reveals that discourse analysis has moved steadily to an explanation of language use. Discourse analysts have become increasingly aware of the importance of the communicative goals and language strategies in discourse analysis. As a result, genre analysis takes form-function correlation and communicative purpose as its research focus. Seen from the academic achievements and discussion in the field, genre is not only a linguistic phenomenon, it is also a result of social activities, a kind of choice, a way of expression, a style, a unity of form and content.By applying the analyzing model and based on the quantitative analysis, in Chapter 4 and 5 business letters are discussed in two aspects. First, the focus is on the general strategies in planning and constructing a business letter. Second, with the switch of stress onto the communicative purpose, business letters are classified and analyzed, and skills to achieve those purposes are amplified with examples.In the dissertation, while presenting linguistic evidence including rules, conventions and features of business genre texts much stress is laid on techniques and strategies in business communication in achieving genre purposes. Hopefully, the findings may prove to be of any practical value in study and reality.