The Study Of Sales Promotion Letters From The Aspect Of Genre Analysis

As China's entry into WTO, China becomes increasingly stronger economically. Consequently, external exchanges have extended into the whole society as well as all fields of the economy. Since more and more companies enter into the international markets, there is much more competition at home and abroad, and it becomes increasingly fiercer. Under these circumstances, China should actively open up to the outside world and participate in more global economic activities. Therefore, as the primary and direct communication channel between corporations and the potential customers, sales promotion letters play a crucial role in publicizing corporations'products and services to the customers. As the primary means of external communication, sales promotion letters may greatly affect the success or failure of the business transactions. To some extent, it is believed that it is only when a writer has produced a good promotional letter that he can achieve his purpose effectively. This is why business discourse has got more and more attention from linguists of various disciplines and pedagogical area.Genre analysis goes beyond the surface-level description of language; rather, it attempts to interpret the deep-level rationale of discourse construction, examines the social and cognitive factors behind discourse structure, and reveals the special form of realization of communicative purposes and the regularity of discourse construction.In this thesis, the author firstly gives attention to the concept of genre in different fields over recent years. Though, researchers in different schools hold different definitions of genre, they still have something in common, that genre is a goal-oriented, dynamic communicative events. Based on the genre approach, scholars have done valuable research. In addition, they attempt to offer deeper explanations of the form-function correlation, providing answers to such questions as "Why is a particular text (genre) written the way it is? " or "why do members of specific discourse communities use the language the way they do?" (Bhatia,1993). Based on these definitions, the author also figures out the determining features of the genre. Taking sales promotion letters as a certain genre, increasing attention is given to find out the communicative patterns of the business promotional genre by elaborating on move structures, obligatory and optional elements, and dealing with syntactical and linguistic features of this promotional discourse. And the author further studies these letters from sociology, psychology to interpret and explain the factors behind or to try to find out why the promotional letters are written in the way it is.Over the past 20 years, a large number of studies in the ESP have been devoted to research article in academic writing. Compared with a large number of studies on academic writing, the amount of genre-based researches focusing on business settings and advertisements are rather limited. And according to Bhatia, advertisements (including newspapers, magazines, broadcasting and on TV), introductions to new books and leaflets are all attributed to the promotional genre. Sales promotion letters can be called a kind of advertisement publicity literature, addressed to a selected group of prospective customers in order to inform them of the products or services and to try to persuade them to purchase. And the purposes of writing sales promotion letters are to provoke the achievements, by describing the high quality and the distinctive features of the products and services, to impress upon consumers that the products and services have well-established reputation, to establish credibility and to promote a good image of the products or services. Hence, the focus of this study is to find the communicative purposes, discourse structure, stylistic features and language features of the sales promotion letters.As to the samples of promotional genre, most of the previous studies are focused on newspaper, magazine, broadcasting and TV. For this thesis, the data, totally 22 letters, were collected from two text books and three friends who are working in the foreign trade companies, for analysis. By the theories of Swales'CARS Model and Hasan's GSP, a constructive genre-based move structure and the writer's choices of obligatory and optional moves are elaborated. Then this thesis goes to the language features in constructing letters to find out how does the writer arrive at his purposes.In summary, by focusing on sales promotion letters, special discourse patterns and language features in the promotional genre is conducted. By doing so, the study attempts to provide insights into ESP teaching, including implications for reading, writing and translating English sales promotion letters discourse.