Computer-mediated Discourse

Electronic mail or e-mail is one of the heavily used forms of Computer-mediated Communication in modern society whose advantages lie in efficiency in time and space, inexpensiveness, convenience and simplicity in sending, receiving, storing and editing information. It is an indispensable communicative tool in people's lives, work and study. Therefore, the analysis of e-mail has great practical values. However, few linguistic scholars have worked on it or conducted a comparative study on it, which is the task for the current study. The present thesis contrasted the linguistic and generic features of English personal e-mails written by native college students and non-native college students of English major on Halliday's register theory and Swales'genre theory within the framework of systemic functional grammar.Halliday points out that register is a semantic concept which is composed by three contextual factors: field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. Specific register determines specific language. Swales puts forward move-step structure in analyzing text genres, that is, there is a regular pattern of'move'and'step'appearing in certain order in specific texts.In the current research, the following three questions have been discussed.1. Are the language and the format of e-mail the same as traditional letters? What are the features of e-mail language?2. Are English e-mails written by native speakers similar or different from what English learners write in terms of form, function as well as language?3. Are e-mail differences caused by cultural, social and cognitive factors among writers of the same language? What contribute to the differences between native and non-native English users?One hundred and four English personal e-mails written by native college students and non-native college students of English major have been collected. Choosing personal e-mails for analysis is because on the one hand, it is the mostly used form of Computer-mediated Communication, and on the other hand, there are more variations of it on language and format; and taking college students as participants is because, first of all, the writers belong to the same age group; and second, except for the differences on language level due to their different mother languages, native and non-native college students share similar educational level and...