Genre Analysis Of Business E-Mail

This study applies genre analysis to business e-mail to illustrate the generic structure and language features of business e-mail.The concept of genre had been prevalent in literature, sociology and rhetoric for a long time; while in recent years, genre analysis of nonliterary works has become an important field of discourse analysis. Genre analysis is an effective method which has developed from the surface level description of language to the deep-level explanation. It mainly concerns the higher-level organization and strategies of written and spoken texts, aiming at revealing their communicative purposes and structures in using the language. The communicative purpose of the discourse community decides the constitution of a certain genre with generally identical schema structure which distinguishes one genre from another. Meanwhile the schema structure decides the content and the language features of the discourse.With the development of computer and internet technology in the last two decades, e-mail has gradually took the place of traditional letters, telegrams and faxes as well as other mediums and has become one of the most important means of business communication. This study mainly adopts the genre analysis theory and schema theory to explore the communicative purposes of business e-mail. The different moves and steps of business e-mail as well as the language features are examined to see how they combined to achieve the communicative purpose of this genre. The writer collected 100 authentic business e-mails from five companies which engage in different import and export trade for analysis. Through the genre analysis with the inductive method, we can generate the following conclusions:1) There is an identifiable generic structure underlying the texts, which is represented by the four moves:"Initiating the business e-mail—Dealing with the business—Soliciting a response—Ending politely". Each move has its own steps. In the constitution of this genre, the four moves are obligatory while the steps are optional. Each move contributes to a part of the overall purpose to be accomplished by the genre, while steps play the role of achieving the intention of the move.2) The media of business e-mail communication is computer which endows business e-mail with distinctive language features. A hybrid nature of written and spoken discourse is observed in business e-mail which is demonstrated on the graphological,...