| As china’s reform and opening to the outside world is going deeper and wider, itslegal industry is faced with both challenges and opportunities. Against this backdrop,higher demands are being imposed on the Chinese foreign-related lawyers in terms oftheir legal English competency as the country is facing growing legal affairs of foreignelements. It is considered as one of the must-have skills for the Chinese foreign-relatedlawyers to prepare legal documents in English, and lawyer’s letters, as one of the mostwidely used paperwork, is one way to deal with legal disputes in a cost-efficient andprompt manner. Lawyer’s demand letter, as one of the many types of lawyer’s letter,refers to the letter prepared by the lawyer representing the client, sent to the opposingparty to persuade him or her to take or cease the actions, so as to defend the legitimaterights and interests of the client. A well-prepared lawyer’s demand letter can be oftremendous help when used to resolve disputes.Recent years have seen the rapid development of genre analysis in the discipline oflinguistics. In the meanwhile, the booming of foreign related legal affairs in China hasalso fuelled the research enthusiasm in legal English. However, there are few researchesconducted of lawyer’s demand letter from the perspective of genre analysis. In view ofthis, this thesis attempts to explore the genre structure and linguistic features of lawyer’sdemand letter with an aim to shed some light on the writing of lawyer’s demand letter.This paper, based on the corpus of20authentic sample demand letters, tries to probeinto the writing features of lawyer’s demand letter both at macroscopic and microscopiclevel, by adopting the qualitative and quantitative study and using the Antconc corpusanalysis tool. At the macroscopic level, with the guidance of Swales’s move-step modeland Hasan’s GSP theory, this paper identifies9compulsory moves and3optional movesas well as the GSP of lawyer’s demand letter. At the microscopic level, based on theinterpersonal function theory, this paper explores how the communicative purpose oflawyer’s demand letter is realized through the linguistic devices of mood and modality. |
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