| The second generation of cross-border business-to-business platforms which can realize the function of international online trade between Chinese sellers and overseas buyers has provided a new research area for language researchers:online business communication messages. In recent years, a considerable number of studies has been carried out on electronic discourse represented by emails. However, few studies have been conducted on online business communication, for example, the new communication medium with the new business pattern of the second generation of cross-border B2B platforms in the late 2009. With the hope of attracting more language scholars' interests for further research in this area, this study is an attempt to analyze online business communication from the aspects of linguistic features, and move structures and discourse strategies.The data of the present study consists of 36 communication cases from 112 cases provided by 24 sellers with over 10,000 words in total. After an analysis of the data, group interviews of 24 sellers were conducted with the aims of confirming the analysis of data and exploring further issues relevant to the research purpose of this thesis.The results of the study indicate that online business communication has a more informal style of a spoken language than business emails, and it also exhibits unique language features on the network. The analysis of moves structure proves that only opening salutation and question answering are the two typified moves in online business communication. The move of additional information is suggested being added to the typified moves. The frequencies of interactional resources in different phases of the discourse were analyzed to identify the development of relationships between buyers and sellers. The realization of communicative goals with the use of interactional metadiscourse was also analyzed. |
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