Power In English E-mail Texts Of International Corporations In China

Sociolinguistics has shown that language use (parole) is a product of social differentiation; that is, language varies according to the social identities of people in interactions, their socially defined purpose, social setting and so on. Therefore, relations of power are exercised and enacted in discourse. In order to find out how power is exercised in hierarchical corporations, the researcher studied the electronic communication within corporations, as it is easily kept record of and has gradually gaindprominence in the business world with the economic globalization and the penetration of the Internet. Email, as a form of Computer-mediated Communication, is a dynamic medium. Different from paper-based mail, Email interaction has its own special features and style that enhance interactivity.This research is an analysis of the authentic electronic communication of professionals at work in the naturalistic setting of the workplace. The selection of language behavior under study consists of exchanges of email interaction built around 'getting things done' in the day-to-day business of three international corporations in China. The research combines a linguistic and a social perspective to the study of language in use. Following the tenets of a critical approach to text analysis, according to Fairclough (1989), the linguistic data for the study is examined for cues and markers that reflect the presence of power relations in language behavior, by means of concordancing to elicit empirical evidence from the corpus, as in the hierarchical corporation power is situated as a form of organizational behavior fundamental to the roles and responsibilities of the corporate members.The evidence shows that in 'getting things done' in the corporate, power is an underlying force in the interaction. A range of linguistic strategies is deployed, which masks and mystifies power. The research concludes that power has to be exercised covertly to make its presence acceptable, and its continued existence sustainable.