Analysis On Context In English Application Letters

The significance of language lies in its practical use, and the meaning of discourse is determined by the context. The purpose of communication can only be achieved by flexible use of language on the basis of context. Context is the most important concept in pragmatic study, and has significance in deduction of discourse; it plays a vital role in understanding and expression of discourse meaning. Through summarizing research of context, it is classified into the traditional settings—static context and cognitive context. Traditional understanding regards language settings as a configuration of static knowledge that controls the process of communication and understanding. In the pragmatic use, the communicators understand the discourse through the selection of the context knowledge. Cognitive interpretation starts from a dynamic cognitive view and takes into consideration of the subjective function of the communicator, which explains that the seeking for meaning itself is a dynamic"perception--inference"process. According to the researches of the linguistists in China, the relationship between traditional settings and cognitive context can be summarized into one sentence: these two views of language environment offer a similar description of the contextual factors, yet interpret differently the processes of meaning construction. The traditional settings and cognitive context are associated together. There are no essential differences between their context factors. Cognitive context is not only the innovation of the traditional settings in the perspective of description of the context factors, but also the improvement of the traditional research methods. Cognitive context is a psychological construct which is built gradually in the interaction of proposition, knowledge of scrip and psychological schema. Joint with the social and cultural elements, the psychological construct selects the presumption of optimal relevance and then deduce the discourse meaning.This thesis mixes the factors classified both in traditional settings and cognitive context. The analysis of the job application letters is carried out from the linguistic context, situational context and cultural context as well as the analysis from the psychological perspective. These elements belong to the traditional settings and cognitive context.Being a kind of social correspondence, job application letter is a letter applied by a job applicant to promote himself or herself in order to get the chance for an interview. It mainly introduces the job hunter's learning experience, work experience, performance, personal characteristics and so on. The communicative purpose of job application is twofold: one is to get access to job interviews directly which is the initial purpose of communication, and the other is approaching to work indirectly, the ultimate purpose of communication. With the special communicative function of the job application letter which is bound to contain contextual factors, when writing a job application letter people should choose the appropriate language according to the context.The purposes of this thesis are as follows:1) To find out whether Chinese applicants follow the principles of job application writing and how they achieve their goals in writing their job application letters.2) To find out whether they use some special or exclusive expressions in the process of achieving their communicative goals and whether they share some similarities in this respect.3) To analyze all the linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena in the collected letters from the perspective of context and explore the behind reasons.In this paper, each English job application letter is divided into three parts: the opening part, the body of the letter and the ending part according to their respective function. Count the special pragmatic phenomena and find out the background contexts. Because of the constraints of the discourse and the structure of the text, the key analysis piont of each part is different. Both the quantitative approach and qualitative approach are used in getting the results of the corpus. The linguistic features of English job application letters written by Chinese are analyzed from a quantitative approach by means of statistics plus qualitative approach. In order to learn the non-linguistic and some congnitive features existed in application letters, an analysis is made from the qualitative approach. The study finds out that Chinese job applicants basically follow the principles of the job application writing and they use certain special expressions which are Chinese exclusive in their job application letters. Chinese job seekers'social and cultural life and ways of thinking generate the influence on the letter content and style of the job application letters.