A Genre Analysis Of English Meeting Minutes

Genre analysis is an effective method which has developed from the surface level description of language to the deep-level explanation. It concerns not only linguistic factors but also social and psychological factors of written and spoken texts, aiming at revealing their communicative purposes and strategies in using the language. The communicative purpose of the discourse community decides the constitution of a certain genre with generally identical generic structure which distinguishes one genre from another, and the generic structure decides the content and the language features of the discourse. By applying the genre theory, especially the theoretical framework of Bhatia's move-structure, this thesis analyzes the generic structure of English meeting minutes. This thesis intends to answer the following research questions:1) Do meeting minutes constitute a specific genre? If yes, in what sense do they constitute the genre?2) How are the move structure and linguistic strategies chosen to realize their communicative purposes of meeting minutes?3) What are the pedagogical implications of this research?In order to answer the above questions, the researcher collects 40 English meeting minutes as data and makes a descriptive and explanatory study of the data. After a qualitative analysis of the communicative purposes, we come up with its move structure and sequence. The obligatory and optional moves in meeting minutes are also explained. The Antconc software and common discourse analysis method are used in both quantitative analysis of keywords and qualitative analysis of the language strategies such as syntactic features and discourse structure. This thesis concludes that:1) English meeting minutes constitute a specific genre. Five moves of Initiating the Meeting Minutes, Opening Declaration, Report, Business and Closure are obligatory moves, the other three moves of Approval of Related Matters of Previous Meeting, Matters Arising and Any Other Business are optional moves. Some steps of the moves are optional and they are selected according to the communicative purposes. Each move contributes to a part of the overall purpose accomplished by the genre, while the steps play the role of achieving the intention of the move.2) On the macro-level, both obligatory and optional moves are selected to achieve communicative purposes of this specific genre, which is informing and empowering. Moves such as Initiating the Meeting Minutes, Matters Arising, Report and Any Other Business are mainly for informing while moves such as Opening Declaration, Approval of Related Matters of Previous Meeting, Business and Closure are used for both informing and empowering. On the micro-level, the strategies of common lexis (e.g. report verbs); formulaic syntactic patterns and discourse structure (e.g. general-specific structure) are used mainly to help to realize the communicative purposes and to ensure the clarity and precision of information.3) The implication of this research:this thesis studies the move structure of English meeting minutes based on an analysis of authentic data, and elaborates such strategies as common lexis, formulaic syntactic patterns and discourse structure. In addition, the thesis also puts forward some suggestions as to the genre-based teaching of Practical English Writing (e.g. English meeting minutes).