A Corpus-based Analysis Of The Genre: Enterprise Website Introductions

With the rapid development of information construction in contemporary society, enterprise websites have become enterprises'platform for internal communication and also a means of displaying the corporate image, shape the corporate culture and improve the competitiveness. Through enterprise websites, the enterprises can better publicize themselves, promote business reputation, and improve management administration, corporate advertisement and marketing. An EWI (Enterprise Website Introduction) as an essential component of an enterprise website which has gradually become a newly-emerged ordinary practical genre should be attached enough professional and academic attention to.Based on the analysis of the genre models by Hasan (1985), Martin (1997), Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), 40 EWIs have been collected to construct a corpus. After research on the EWIs in the corpus, the moves and steps of this genre are proposed and the discourse structure is constructed. Then on the basis of Hasan's GSP (Generic Structure Potential) discourse model, the frequency of moves and steps are analyzed to find out the obligatory and the optional moves and the GSP model of EWIs is explored. Under the guidance of Crismore and Markkanen's (1993)and Halliday's (1973) metadisourse theories, the thesis analyses the metadiscourse features of EWIs. Finally, by using Wordsmith Tool 4.0, the author makes a comparative analysis of the frequency and concordance of some notional words of the corpus texts.The main research results are as follows: 1) EWIs have four moves: Move 1—Hospitality Address(HA), Move 2—Website Information Presentation(WIP), Move 3—Background Introduction(BI) and Move 4—Conclusive Forecasts(CF), in which Move1, Move 3 and Move 4 are obligatory moves and Move 2 is an optional move. 2) The metadiscourse of EWIs is characterized by textual markers and attitude markers which are closely related with the communicative purposes of this genre. 3) The linguistic features of EWIs are different from common academic texts. For instance, EWIs are likely to largely utilize the first and the second personal and possessive pronouns and seldom use the third personal and possessive pronouns.The most important contribution of this thesis is the analysis and construction of a new but neglected genre and the discourse structure and linguistic features are proposed and illustrated, which expands Swales'(1981,1985,1990) research on"introduction". It is hoped that the findings of the research can enrich the studies on discourse analysis, ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and other related applied linguistic areas. The structure model and the linguistic features can also be used to guide future EWIs writing and reading. In conclusion, the thesis has great significance in professional, academic and pedagogical areas.