Genre-based Comparison Of International Business Correspondences From Chinese And Native English Speakers

With the great development and popularity of IT (information technology),international business emails have been gradually replacing the traditional communicationgenres like business letters, faxes and telegrams, and becoming the most frequently appliedgenre in international business community. For the past few years, scholars on ESP(English for Specific Purposes) have studied international business correspondences in awide range. Most researches focus on the translation and teaching of international businesscorrespondences, few scholars have studied the features of international businesscorrespondences on the lexical, syntactic and textual levels, and some others studied thelinguistic features like fuzzy language and politeness strategies. Nevertheless, the study ofthe international business correspondences only from the surface of language is not enough,and cannot thoroughly represent the roles of this practical genre and its effects tointernational business communication. The previous studies haven’t involved thecomparison of cultures between Chinese and western, and the motivation of cultures to thewriting of international business correspondences cannot be reflected. Therefore, it isnecessary to make a genre-based study on international business correspondences with theaims of revealing the similarities and differences of the international businesscorrespondences from Chinese and Native English speakers, and exploring theirmotivations.First and foremost, with the collection of81international business emails from thebusiness communication between two Chinese import and export companies and theirclients from the United States and the United Kingdom, this study built a corpus of IBEC(International Business Emails Corpus) with two sub-corpora, namely Native EnglishCorpus and Non-native English Corpus. At the theoretical level, according to the “move- step” strategy proposed by Swales and based on the move-step structure of business lettersconstructed by Bhatia, this thesis proposed a move-step structure of international businessemails by analyzing the distribution of the moves and steps in the emails of IBEC. As acomparative study, on the one hand, by applying the corpus software Wordsmith4.0, thisthesis analyzed IBEC and compared it with BEC (Business English Corpus) and PUBC(Hong Kong Polytechnic University Business English Corpus), and achieved the lexicalfeatures of IBEC like terminology, abbreviation and polite words. On the other hand, withthe comparison of the emails in the two sub-corpora of IBEC, this thesis uncovered thesimilarities between the international business correspondences from Chinese and NativeEnglish speakers, namely, macro-representation structure, macro-interaction structure andthe wide use of politeness strategies, and their differences on the move AD and politenessstrategies.In conclusion, with the analysis of the similarities and differences betweeninternational business emails and other business discourse, and the move-step structure ofinternational business emails in different cultures, this study summarized the lexical,syntactic and textual features of international business emails as a specific genre, andexposited the effects of different cultures in China and western world to the practicalapplication of this genre.