A Genre-based Analysis Of Business Mission Statements

Genre analysis as a recent development in discourse analysis has evolved from the surface-level description of language to deep-level explanation and has concerned itself most with describing the higher-level organization and structures of written or spoken texts. It is used to study their communicative purposes and strategies in using the language.This thesis investigates the business Mission Statement in a genre-based approach. Despite an increasing interest in the study and analysis of MS, studies on the genre approach have been rarely conducted. The proposed approach is adopted in a descriptive and explanatory way of studying 30 authentic MSs downloaded from corporate websites. The contents of MS are introduced and communicative purposes are analyzed. After analyzing the different moves adopted in MSs in our corpus, we come up with the generic structure along with the obligatory and optional moves in the MS. The function of each move is analyzed and the rationale behind it is specified. The strategies adopted in MS are identified, which are concentrated on lexical strategies: the use of evaluative lexis and frequent use of first personal pronoun and proper namesLast but not least, some suggestions for professionals drafting a MS successfully and for students learning to write a MS in ESP courses are provided.