| Along with the rapid development of economy in China, especially after achieving its membership in the WTO, the international trade between China and other countries is ever increasing. As the primary means of external communication, English business letter is an indispensable part in today economic activity. It bears the social function of establishing trade relationships, communicating business information and building business images. Further, it has become a common used, brightly characterized and highly conventionalized communicative event in discourse community. Generally speaking, English business letter has special format and the composing of such letters has certain rules. Besides, the special communicative functions of English business letter decide its uniqueness in genre. With genre analysis as the theoretical framework, the present study intends to explore the move structure and linguistic features of English business letter. The aim of this study is to help people better perceive the discourse of English business letter so as to better comprehend and create English business letter in accord with international convention.The present study based on the theory of genre analysis. Genre analysis is the product of interdisciplinary research, involving both stylistic and discourse analysis. The basic aim of genre analysis is to study communicative purpose and linguistic strategy. Its prominent characteristic is explanatory. As representatives of Swalesian School, Swales and Bhatia, taking academic and professional discourses as analytic material, present their analyzing models consisting of moves and steps. J. R. Martin, a representative of Australian school, divides genres into communicative events of appointments with dentists, story telling, job hunting, dinner inviting, etc., focusing on analyzing the schemata structure of these communicative events. R. Hasan proposed generic structure potential (GSP) in 1978. She (1985) claims that a genre is characterized by the array of obligatory elements as well as optional elements with which it is associated. This research adopts the approaches based on the genre study (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993; Martin, 1997; Hasan, 1989) to explore the moves and the structures of English Business Letter, identify and describe the obligatory and optional components in the discourse as well as the sequencing of the structural elements in the textual organizations. Some detailed explanations are given on the move distributions according to the writers'specific communicative purposes. The present study is also carried out from the levels of text, lexicon and pragmatics.English business letter is a macro-genre system, including several sub-genres, such as sales genre, claim genre, complaint genre, request genre, etc. To ensure the reliability, validity and maneuverability, sales letter, the most representative one in English business letter, is chosen as the objective of this study and given a detailed analysis. And sixteen sales letters are selected both from the Internet (http://www.4hb.com) and the textbook, Modern Business Writing by Grahame T Bilbow, PhD. (Pearson Education North Asia Limited, 2000) as the data of the study. All the letters are supposed to be written by English native speakers. Letter 2 is given a detailed study while others are given a quantitative analysis. Through the analysis, we found that discourses of same genre bear same discourse structure and linguistic features. They can be explained through the purposes the genre tries to achieve. As for sales genre, it has 7 moves, and among them, 4 moves are obligatory and 3 are optional. At the level of text, the 7 moves form a continuum and present in sequence especially the obligatory. Lexically, four kinds of words or expressions are often used in sales letters. They are technical terms, literary words, neologism and simple words. And pragmatically, the features of business letter are acknowledged by most business dealers as the 7Cs---complete, clear, concrete, concise, correct, considerate and courteous.The findings of this study can be applied to pedagogical practice, especially for English teaching for specific purpose. As it is known to all, English for specific purposes (ESP) has high structural formation, definite communicative purpose, communicative subject and particular topic, making its discourse form different from other styles. Thus, ESP teaching is more suitable for the implementation of a genre-based teaching approach. So, the theory of genre analysis can be applied to classroom teaching consciously and teaching activities can be carried out around schemata structure. Accordingly, students'awareness of communicative purposes and discourse structure that different genres carry will be cultivated, thus a better understanding and a deeper perception will be achieved.
|
PDF Full Text Request