A Genre-Based Analysis Of Discourse Structure Of The Market Transaction In Urumqi City

The term genre has recently been adopted by functional linguists to refer to different types of communicative events. They argue that language exists to fulfill certain functions and that these functions will determine the overall shape or generic structure of the discourse. This structure emerges as people communicate with one another---that is, it will have certain predictable stages (Nunan, 1993 p, 48).Genre analysis is the study of how language is used within a particular communicative context. A genre-based approach starts with communicative purpose and gives particular attention to the rhetorical organization of texts, and, more generally, the ways in which the purpose is conveyed through language. The data adopted in the present study are the thirty real market transaction discourses recorded in Urumqi markets, in which the customer and the seller are female students from the colleges in Urumqi including Xinjiang Normal University, Xinjiang Education college, Urumqi Vocation University, and Tianshan College. The tools we used are Mp3 and digital recording tool, and during the process of recording, we hide our intention of recording. Guided by genre analysis approach, the present study investigates and tries to find out the generic structure and the detailed description of the structural features of market transaction. We analyze the discourse structure by adopting Swales's methods of moves and steps.After the analysis, the overall structure we summarized in market transaction includes the following steps: introduction, sales request, offering product, price enquiry, sales enquiry, offering incentive, evaluating product, C's derogating, demanding a lower price, seller enquiries about customer's price, customer's price, seller's new price, resolution, (pay and goods handover), and finis. The steps in a market transaction that appear the most often include the seller's evaluating product (EP), the customer's price enquiry (PE), sales enquiry (SE), demanding a lower price (DLP) etc. And these steps can be summarized as five moves: Introduction^ showing intention^ negotiation ^ resolution ^ conclusion. The signal ^ shows the fixed sequence of transaction.