A Study On The Memetic Phenomena In Business English Correspondence

Ever since China has entered WTO, China has got more chances to do businesswith other countries of the world. As the most effective means of businesscommunication, business correspondence plays an active part in business affairs.Thanks to its importance, many scholars have done research on business Englishcorrespondence. Based on previous researches, this thesis analyses the memes ofbusiness English correspondence from macro-structure perspective andmicro-structure perspective, reveals the rule of replication and transmission of thelanguage memes of business English correspondence and provides suggestions for itswriting teaching.Memetics is a new discipline which explains the evolution of culture. The basicunit is meme. It has been applied to linguistics in recent years to analyse linguisticphenomenon. According to the definition of meme, language itself is meme. It isacceptable and reasonable to use memetics to analyse business Englishcorrespondence for business English is the special form of language.This study adopts the way of qualitative analysis.92pieces of real businessletters are collected to form the database of this study. With the guidance of memeticstheory, this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the data. The result shows that there arevarious kinds of memes existing in every component of business Englishcorrespondence. Besides, through the analysis of dynamic process of language memesof business English correspondence, three ways of its transmission are proposed,namely, direct application, replacement and imitation and the reason for the survivalof the successful language memes of business English correspondence is that theyhave met the selection criteria of every stage, i.e. authority, formality, invariance,utility, expressivity and publicity.What is more, based on the above study, the author provides five suggestions forbusiness English correspondence writing teaching from the perspective of memetics,namely, choosing appropriate input material, valuing recitation, promoting imitation, permeating cultural education and carrying out rehearsal, with the purpose offacilitating the replication and transmission of language memes in business Englishcorrespondence.