The Language Features Of Application Letter: A Systemic-Functional Interpretation

There has been a growing interest in the study of the concept of genre in recent years. The concept of genre itself is certainly not a new one. What is new is the attempt to characterize genre in terms of a set of properties generally applicable across a number of genres. A number of papers of Functional linguists have appeared which aim to define the generic properties of texts.The letter of application, which is also called "cover letter", is the letter sent to the potential employer to set up an interview on the writer. The role of the application letter is to draw a clear connection between the job you are seeking and your qualifications listed in the resume. This type of letter is of wide range of application and importance in its social function. Little research, however, has been carried out on how the letter of application can be characterized in terms of generic structure and on the systemic description of its language features on lexico-grammatical level. This paper tries to discuss the structural organization and the lexico-grammatical encoding of a particular genre, the letter of application, from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar.The whole thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 presents a brief introduction to the theoretical and practical need of the study as well as the general structure of the thesis. A literature review of previous studies on genre and genre analysis and also on the application letter is demonstrated in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework of the study, which shows the theoretical backbones of the systemic-functional approach to the analysis of this text type. Chapter 4 presents a detailed description of the way the proposed study is conducted. In this chapter, both the generic and rhetorical structure of the application letter is generated in order to depict the macro picture of its language feature. Then the lexico-grammatical description gives a micro picture of the application letter. Through the discussions from both macro and micro perspectives in Chapter 4, we obtain the conclusions in Chapter 5.