| With the deepening of reform and opening-up to the outside world, China's international trade has made rapid progress. Especially after its entrance into the WTO, many Chinese enterprises are getting more and more directly involved in the international trade activities. English business letters (EBL) have been widely recognized as important media in business negotiation and communications. People have made a lot of study on business letter writing and there have been many kinds of instructive publications in this field, most of which focus on explaining grammar and vocabulary. While these studies are surely helpful for business letter writing, as far as I know, none of them chooses a linguistic perspective. This thesis attempts to conduct an analytical study of business letter discourses from a linguistic perspective. More specifically, seeking the linguistic characteristics of successful business letters from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) will be the focus of this study. Through this study the author hopes to prove that the theories of SFG can be employed to analyze English business letters and are actually effective.Chapter 1 illustrates the significance of this research and introduces the methods of data collection and approaches of data analysis. Chapter 2 is a literature review on the basic theories of Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar. It confirms the superiority of discourse analysis over the traditional sentence grammar as well as the application value of SFG in the field of discourse analysis. SFG contains two parts: Systemic Grammar (SG) and Functional Grammar (FG). The Systemic Grammar claims that language is a system network of meaning potential. In communication what we need to do is just make choices."Choice is meaning"is the soul of Systemic Grammar. In Functional grammar, the function of language is classified into three metafuncions: ideational function, interpersonal function and...
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