A Corpus-based Study On Syntactic Features Of Business English Correspondence

Corpus-based study has attracted much more researchers’ attention nowadays, which refers to its unique advantage of relying on a great deal of real data. Meanwhile, ESP plays an important role in English language. Business English correspondence, as a significant branch of ESP, has also constructed a close relationship with corpus linguistics.Most of the research on Business English focuses on vocabulary, especially word collocation.However research on syntactic analysis is not too much. Study on syntactic features can help teachers and students in business English teaching and writing, especially clearing up the relationship between lexical and grammar. Therefore, study on syntactic features has a great significance in writing business English correspondence. This study bases on a self-built corpus in which data is all real. The self-built corpus consists of 150 mails accounted for 12113 words. A combination of both qualitative and quantitative analysis is used in this study. With the help of Antconc3.4.3w, this study first does a research on syntactic complexity through analyzing word length and sentence length. After a rough understanding of difficult level, then the research extends to content word and function word. Finally, three categories of syntactic pattern of passive voice, interrogative sentence and subjunctive mood are further analyzed.This study comes to a conclusion from data statistics and discussion. There are some differences between business English correspondence and ordinary English: such as the amount of content words is much larger than function words, polite words and nominalization accounts for a large proportion. The two have similarities as well. There is no significant difference between the two in word length and sentence length, which is shared a similar usage by function words.Self-built corpus contains far more passive voice than CLOB. Polite questions with modal verbs are in fact tending to be widely used by writers. The recurrence rate of “Would you please” goes for top 1. Modal verbs also occupy a large proportion while subjunctive mood is rarely used in self-built corpus. Business English correspondence is mainly written in the five basic sentence patterns and usually expresses itself with simple sentences rather than complex sentences. In the end, the data is divided into three categories in terms of communicative function, which verifies the application of 7C principles and the conclusion of this study.This study hopes to enrich both the practice and theoretical aspects of business English correspondence on the basis of summarizing syntactic features. Through analysis and discussion,conclusions can be appropriately applied to business English teaching and instruction design from the point of view of the research results. In the process of teaching, teachers need to pay much more attention to the application of courtesy principle. The importance of terminology should be highlighted on teaching content. In addition, the usage of simple words and content words should be emphasized like how they do in common English. Furthermore, it is necessary to introduce corpus software to be an aid to the teaching of reducing the design of complex sentence in teaching.