The Genre Characteristics Of Business English Emails

With the development of international internet technology, the ways ofcommunication have been changed as well. E-mail has gradually taken the place oftraditional letters and has become one of the most important medium of businesscommunication. Based on the theory of genre, this study integrated genre analyticalmethods with corpus analytical procedures which systemically explored the genericstructure and linguistic features of English business e-mail. The author selected30e-mails in6different contexts from Enron Corporation e-mail corpus for a genericstructure acquisition by scheme and move-step methodologies. In addition, the linguisticfeatures were figured out by corpus analysis, which included both lexical andgrammatical features. The author hopes this study could help the business e-mail usersas well as students better understand the generic structure and linguistic features ofbusiness e-mail, thus they may use it as a computer communication medium in businessmore efficiently.