Cohesion Analysis On Business English Correspondence

With the fast development of economic globalization, Business English correspondences play a more and more important role in foreign trade. How to write a clear appropriate business letter has become the focus of attention from business and educational communities. With this in mind, this thesis will analyze daily Business English correspondences to determine their cohesive features. It employs cohesive devices to organize single linguistic items (such as lexicons, phrases and sentences) into a clear, fluent and logical text, and also explores its implications for the teaching of Business English Correspondence writing.The studies of cohesion develop quickly in China, however, previous studies pay more attention to application, but less to a rethink of cohesion theory itself; the studies of Business English Correspondence have too broad scope, and lack further exploration from one specific aspect. Also, previous studies seldom combine cohesion and Business English Correspondence together, this thesis, therefore, will use cohesion to research Business English Correspondence.This thesis embraces two studies: the analysis of cohesive ties and the analysis from cohesion to the thematic progression in Business English correspondences. Adopting Halliday's cohesion analysis approach, the first study analyzes cohesion of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion in 120 Business English correspondences and also obtains the statistics on the quantities of each cohesive device; based on the analysis of the cohesive ties, the second study also elaborates the thematic progression through employing the theory of the thematic progression, analyzes how the themes and rhemes progress in one sample correspondence. The analysis of cohesion is designed to discern and collect cohesive ties, and deduce core cohesive chains in business letters. The analysis of the thematic progression, through identifying theme and rheme of each clause, shows how clauses are related and connected with one another and develop into a text.The first study shows that in the five types of cohesive devices, Business English correspondences employ reference and lexical cohesion more often, especially pronominal references, collocations in their respective sub-classifications. The second study indicates cohesion is a way to construct a text, and is also a way of speaking and communicating. It is clear that the second study regards cohesion from a new perspective– rethinking the cohesion theory itself, not just as a simple application of cohesion. When teaching Business English Correspondence, teachers should put special emphasis on guiding learners to pay attention to the cohesive relations to rhetoric, and more attention to the thematic progression within texts so as to enable learners to write succinct, smooth and logical letters.