A Genre Analysis Of English Sales Promotion Letters From Systemic Functional Perspective

Sales promotion letter, as a sub-category of business correspondence, functions as conveying the information of goods and services to the prospective customers so as to persuade them to purchase certain commodity being promoted. On the influence of the globalization, sending sales promotion letters abroad is quite important to win more customers. Therefore, English sales promotion letter becomes effective and common in the international business communication.This thesis compares the move structures as well as the specific linguistic features used in the two different types of English Sales Promotion Letters (ESPLs), that is, ESPLs written to old customers and ESPLs written to new customers, with an aim to illustrate how the writers of two types of letters fulfill their communicative purposes best, how the interpersonal relationship is well-established, what kind of strategy choices they make, and why it is in such a case.To satisfy this aim, based on the genre study of Bhatia (1993), a corpus of sixty English sales promotion letters (thirty for each type) has been examined to explore the moves and the structure levels of the text. Different communicative purposes between the two types of letters were identified, which give rise to some major differences in move structures, such as the functions of mentioning former business in ESPLs written to old customers, the use of headline and testimonial in those to new customers and so on. These findings are worth noting for better communication with different kinds of customers and the development in teaching genres to learners.Besides, with the theory of Halliday's systemic functional grammar, the present study also study the linguistic features of these two types of letters in an attempt to reveal what linguistic devices realize interpersonal meanings and how interpersonal meanings are realized in the two kinds of ESPLs. It is hoped that this tentative analysis of linguistic realizations of interpersonal meanings will be a helpful supplement to the studies on sales correspondence, and meanwhile it will deepen the Chinese learners' understanding of sales promotion letters and benefit the teaching and writing of ESPLs in China.