A Study On Syntactic Features Of China English In Business E-mails

English has been localized into different varieties of English when influenced by local culture and convention. Among them, China English (CE) is a newly developing member of the World Englishes which is largely based on British English and American English and is characterized by the transfer of Chinese linguistic and cultural norms. The study of CE started from the 1980s in China, and gained popularity since the beginning of the 21st century. A great number of domestic and foreign researchers have focused on the study of CE. They mainly explored the existence of CE, the definition of CE and linguistic features of CE. The researches of CE seldom specifically concentrate on the syntax of CE, whereas the studies of lexical features of CE are more frequently found in the linguistic field. Since CE is a developing variety of English, which is subject to ongoing codification and normalization process, the systematic study of CE is not completed yet. Regarding the study on syntactic features of CE, Xu (2010) summarizes a list of features involving spoken and written China English data. Compared with other studies of syntax, Xu’s (2010) research is relatively systematic. The author chose his conclusions of syntactic features of CE as models in this study.The purpose of the thesis is to analyze the syntactic features of business e-mails based on Xu’s (2010) model of CE’s syntactic features. The reason why the author chose this topic is that the study of CE seldom extends to corporate environment. Based on the current research gap, the author chose business e-mails as the data to explore syntactic features of CE in corporate environment. The business e-mails in this thesis mean English e-mails used for communication in ordinary working conditions. Two research questions of this study are put forward based on the purpose. (1) Does CE exist in business e-mails? If it does exist, what are the syntactic features of CE in business e-mails? (2) Does the users’ attitudes towards the syntactic features of CE influence the use of CE’s syntax in business e-mails?In order to answer the questions above, two studies were conducted, including a text analysis and a questionnaire survey. Conducting the text analysis study, the author collected fifty e-mails from a foreign company as the data, and the official language of the foreign company is English. After analyzing the data, a questionnaire survey about the attitudes towards CE was conducted to help understand that whether CE users’attitudes influence the usage of CE in business e-mails. Twenty participants ranging from 20 to 40 were involved in the survey, half of them were male and half of them were female.Results of the data analysis of business e-mails indicate that CE does exist in business e-mails and there are five obvious syntactic features of CE existing in business e-mails. They are the use of imperatives, modifying-modified sequence, topic-comment, unmarked OSV and S(O)PV. The results of the questionnaire survey show that the participants keep a tolerant attitude towards the development of CE. The findings verify that the users’attitudes towards the syntactic features of CE influence the use of CE’s syntax to some extent.The implication of this study is that China English can be taught as a variety of English in classroom teaching in the feature. Lastly, based on the limitations of this study, suggestions of further studies on syntactic features of China English in business e-mails were given, such as enlarge the samples of business e-mails.