A Genre Analysis Of Chinese And American Company E-mail Replies To Customer Enquiry

More and more companies now rely on the benefits of e-mail communication as a means of ensuring customer service. This article describes a contrastive study of e-mail replies to customers'enquiry between Chinese and American companies. It is assumed that the medium characteristics have implications for the rhetorical features and cultural differences may affect discourse genre. To answer these, our research focuses on analyzing contrastively data of authentic Chinese and American business e-mail replies to customer enquiry. At the macro-textual level, the analysis focuses on text features and rhetorical structure, mainly drawing on the notion of Move. At the micro-textual level, the analysis concentrated on the discourse elements. The article also discusses the cultural preferences that Chinese and American writers show. From the analysis, we discovered that e-mail reply to the customer's enquiry entails characteristics of less formal style, the omission of salutation and closing. The Chinese business e-mails follow a similar discourse structure and display similar stylistic features to those identified in their American counterpart. Although there are some differences in the customer friendly behavior and rhetorical strategies, we found no idiosyncratic moves. We may believe that globalization allows...