DOCTORAL DISSERTATION ZSUBRINSZKY ZSUZSANNA A GENRE-BASED DESCRIPTION OF BUSINESS EMAILS A study of British and Hungarian business people’s L1 and L2 business emails

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Language Pedagogy Ph.D. Programme Eötvös Loránd University

DOCTORAL DISSERTATION

ZSUBRINSZKY ZSUZSANNA

A GENRE-BASED DESCRIPTION OF BUSINESS EMAILS A study of British and Hungarian business people’s L1 and L2

business emails

Consultant: KÁROLY KRISZTINA, Ph.D., habil.

Members of the Committee:

Dr. Klaudy Kinga, habil. egyetemi tanár Dr. Uwe Pohl, egyetemi docens

Magnuczné Dr. Godó Ágnes Dr. Eszenyi Réka Dr. Heltai Pál, főiskolai tanár Dr. Holló Dorottya, egyetemi docens Dr. Kurtán Zsuzsa, habil. egyetemi docens

Budapest, 2009

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ... 3

1 CHAPTER 1: OVERVIEW OF LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS IN ESP ... 7

1.1 SETTING THE SCENE ... 7

1.2 PERSPECTIVES ON WRITTEN TEXTS ... 8

1.3 LINGUISTIC ANALYSES IN ESP ... 9

1.4 THE VARIOUS STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE USE ... 12

1.5 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND TO GENRE THEORY ... 14

1.5.1 DEFINITIONS OF GENRE ... 15

1.5.1.1 SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS ... 16

1.5.1.2 NEW RHETORIC ... 18

1.5.1.3 THE ESP VIEW OF GENRE ... 19

1.6 SUMMARY ... 23

2 CHAPTER 2: GENRE KNOWLEDGE IN ESP: DEFINITION OF MAIN CONCEPTS ... 26

2.2 COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSE ... 27

2.3 SCHEMATIC STRUCTURE ... 29

2.3.1 MOVE STRUCTURE ... 31

2.3.2 CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN RHETORICAL MOVES ... 34

2.4 DISCOURSE COMMUNITY ... 36

2.5 SUMMARY ... 39

3 CHAPTER 3. CROSS-CULTURAL ASPECTS IN BUSINESS GENRES ... 40

3.2 RHETORICAL STANDARDS ... 40

3.3 CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATIC MEANINGS ... 42

3.4 SUMMARY ... 43

4 CHAPTER 4. INSIGHTS INTO THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EMAIL COMMUNICATION ... 44

4.2 THE LINGUISTIC CHARACTER OF SPOKEN AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE ... 45

4.2.1 DYCHOTOMOUS MODELS ... 46

4.2.2 SPECTRAL MODELS ... 48

4.2.3 CROSS-MODALITY MODELS ... 50

4.3 WHAT IS EMAIL COMMUNICATION? ... 50

4.3.1 THE PLACE OF EMAIL WITHIN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION ... 52

4.3.2 EMAIL AS GENRE ... 53

4.3.3 COMPARING BUSINESS EMAILS WITH OTHER BUSINESS GENRES ... 55

4.3.4 PREVIOUS STUDIES ON BUSINESS EMAIL ... 60

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4.4 SUMMARY ... 65

5 CHAPTER 5. THE EMAIL GENRE MODEL ... 66

5.2 KEY TERMS ... 67

5.3 THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EXISTING GENRE-BASED ANALYTICAL TOOL ... 70

5.3.1 SWALES’S CARS MODEL ... 70

5.3.2 BHATIA’S PROMOTIONAL GENRE MODEL ... 73

5.3.3 METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS WITH SWALES’S CARS AND BHATIA’S PROMOTIONAL GENRE MODELS ... 76

5.3.4 POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS ... 80

5.4 DEVELOPING THE TOOL: THE EMAIL GENRE MODEL ... 80

5.5 IMPLICATIONS OF A PILOT STUDY... 82

5.5.1 SETTING UP THE EGM ... 83

5.5.2 THE TESTING OF THE EGM ... 85

5.5.3 CLASSIFICATION OF COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES WITHIN MOVE 1 ... 87

5.6 COMPLEMENTING EGM WITH LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS ... 89

5.6.1 MOVES/STEPS AND THEIR LINGUISTIC FUNCTIONS ... 90

5.6.2 CATEGORIES FOR LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS WITHIN MOVE 1 ... 90

5.7 LANGUAGE MISTAKES IN THE HUNGARIAN L2 EMAILS ... 112

5.8 STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF BUSINESS EMAILS ... 115

5.8.1 NORMS FOR WRITING BUSINESS EMAILS: FORMAL VS. INFORMAL ... 115

5.8.2 ABBREVIATED FORMS IN THE PRESENT CORPUS ... 117

5.9 PRAGMATIC CHARACTERISTICS OF BUSINESS EMAILS ... 120

5.9.1 DIRECTNESS/INDIRECTNESS ... 120

5.10 FORMULAIC/FIXED EXPRESSIONS IN THE BUSINESS EMAILS ... 121

5.11 SUMMARY ... 124

6 CHAPTER 6. METHOD OF ANALYSIS ... 126

6.2 RATIONALE ... 126

6.3 AIMS AND THE DATA ... 127

6.3.1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ... 127

6.3.2 PARTICIPANTS AND TEXTS SUBMITTED TO ANALYSIS ... 128

6.4 PROCEDURES OF ANALYSIS ... 129

6.4.1 IDENTIFICATION OF THE COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES ... 129

6.4.2 DETERMINING THE BASIC UNIT OF ANALYSIS ... 130

6.4.3 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS ON FORMAL SURFACE TEXT FEATURES ... 131

6.4.4 IDENTIFYING THE MOVES AND STEPS IN THE CORPUS ... 133

6.4.4.1 COMPARING THE POSITION AND SUCCESSION OF EACH MOVE/STEP ... 134

6.4.4.2 COMPARING THE FREQUENCY OF EACH MOVE/STEP IN THE SUB-CORPORA ... 136

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6.4.5 STATISTICAL PROCEDURES ... 137

6.4.6 SAMPLE ANALYSIS ... 137

6.4.7 RELIABILITY MEASURES ... 139

6.5 SUMMARY ... 144

7 CHAPTER 7. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ... 145

7.2 DESCRIPTIVE SURFACE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE THREE SUB-CORPORA . 145 7.2.1 GENERAL LENGTH FEATURES ... 145

7.2.2 THE TYPES OF CLAUSES IN THE THREE SUB-CORPORA... 148

7.2.3 THE TYPES OF SENTENCES IN THE THREE SUB-CORPORA ... 151

7.3 THE ORDER OF MOVES/STEPS IN THE THREE SUB-CORPORA ... 153

7.3.1 STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ORDER OF MOVES/STEPS ... 155

7.4 THE FREQUENCY OF MOVES AND STEPS: QUANTITATIVE DIFFERENCES ... 157

7.4.1 COMPARISON OF MOVE 1 IN THE THREE SUB-CORPORA ... 160

7.5 THE KEY LINGUISTIC FEATURES ACCOMPANYING THE MOVES/STEPS ... 167

7.6 SUMMARY OF THE MAIN FINDINGS ... 169

7.6.1 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY ... 171

7.6.2 LIMITATIONS DERIVING FROM THE METHOD OF INVESTIGATION ... 171

7.7 SUMMARY OF MAIN FINDINGS AND THEIR RELATION TO PREVIOUS RESEARCH RESULTS ... 173

7.7.1 THE SHARED COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES ... 173

7.7.2 CROSS-CULTURAL RHETORICAL DIFFERENCES IN THE BUSINESS EMAILS... 174

7.7.3 THE SPOKEN-WRITTEN NATURE OF BUSINESS EMAILS... 175

7.7.4 THE STYLE OF THE BUSINESS EMAIL... 175

7.7.5 BUSINESS EMAIL COMPARED TO OTHER BUSINESS GENRES ... 176

7.7.6 RHETORICAL DIFFERENCES IN THE BUSINESS EMAILS ... 177

8 CHAPTER 8. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS ... 178

8.2 IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING ESP RHETORIC ... 178

8.2.1 AWARENESS RAISING WITH L1 LITERACY EXPERIENCE ... 178

8.2.2 COMPARISON OF L1 EXPERIENCE AND L2 EXPECTATIONS ... 179

8.2.3 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUNGARIAN L1 AND L2 RHETORICAL SCHEMATA ... 180

8.2.4 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGISH L1 AND HUNGARIAN L2 LANGUAGE USE ... 181

8.2.5 GENRE AWARENESS ... 181

8.2.6 MEDIATING BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE ... 183

8.3 SUMMARY ... 183

9 CONCLUSION ... 185

REFERENCES ... 190

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APPENDIX 1. ... 209

APPENDIX 2. ... 210

APPENDIX 3. ... 211

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1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to place on record my sincere thanks to the following:

My thesis supervisor and mentor, Dr. Krisztina Károly, Department of English Language Pedagogy, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, for her guidance and encouragement throughout the PhD course and the accomplishment of the dissertation.

Dr. Dorottya Holló, Department of English Language Pedagogy, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest) for her valuable comments on earlier drafts of this work.

Mr. Attila Balog (Managing Director of the Telecommunication Company), for his kind cooperation in making the company’s emails available for research purposes.

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2 Abstract

The main aim of this dissertation is to propose an analytical model for the structural and linguistic description of business email as a genre, as no analytical tool has been created so far that would capture the stereotypical discoursal/structural characteristics of this genre. More precisely, the study puts forward a theory- and data-based model, the so- called Email Genre Model (EGM) for the structural and linguistic description of business emails in English, which is then tested on 30 English L1, 30 English L2 and 30 Hungarian L1 business emails. The theoretical starting points of the undertaking are the CARS (Create a Research Space) model developed by Swales (1990) and Bhatia’s (1993) Promotional Genre Model. It will be shown that the move/step technique of genre analysis developed originally for the study of academic genres can be applied not only for business letters and legal documents but to business emails as well.

Therefore, the newly developed EGM is tested for its reliability and validity in revealing the cross-cultural rhetorical traditions and patterns in business emails. The results of the analysis show that there are culturally-determined differences between English and Hungarian business people’s L1 and L2 discourse in terms of rhetorical structure as well as linguistic characteristics. I will also point to the pedagogical implications that the current comprehensive analysis offers for the methodology of teaching Business English writing in the Hungarian EFL context.

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3 Introduction

Electronic mail as a tool of mass global communication has become increasingly common and important in both daily and business lives. My interest in the study of business email communication originates in my own personal experience as an instructor of Business English (BE) to Hungarian students at a Business College in Budapest. In higher-education settings where BE is a top priority of instruction, it is very important for teachers of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) to establish channels of communication with the actual working environment, in order to train future managers to communicate effectively. Therefore, by focusing on the students’ language needs for communication skills, ESP courses “aim to specify as closely as possible what exactly it is that students have to do through the medium of English” (Robinson, 1991, p. 3).

As technology increasingly takes centre-stage in our lives and most companies expect an increase in the use of written English, mostly for e-mail communication, there are potent reasons for incorporating the teaching of email communication into the syllabus.

Besides my personal professional interest in the topic, the theoretical rationale for this study is that despite all the attempts (e.g. Swales and Feak, 1994; Ashley, 2003) to analyse and describe email to see how it has shaped and been shaped by preconceived standards of discourse, in contrast to other modes of communication, no taxonomy exists that would capture the rhetorical/structural and linguistic characteristics of this genre.

In recent years, the advancement of modern technology has brought about the innovative use of computers in second language learning and teaching, especially in the area of writing instruction (Haddon, Smith, Brattan and Smith, 1995; Pennington, 1996;

Warschauer, 1996; Booswood, 1997), yet there is only very limited literature on the effects of new technological developments, such as email, on business communication (Eustace, 1996; Louhiala-Salminen, 1996; Akar, 1998; Gains, 1999). As the norms which govern the use of this new medium have not been defined adequately and “research has so far provided no clear answer to the question of whether a stylistic protocol exists for the writing of email messages" (Gains, 1999, p. 82), it is still a question whether we are

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4 in fact witnessing a distinct genre that is by nature different from traditionally written or spoken genres.

Attempts have been made to outline the rhetorical requirements of email (Yli- Jokipii, 1994), its genre-specific style (Pajzs, 1996; Crystal, 2001; Danet, 2001), and its linguistic properties (Gimenez, 2000). Studies relying on these descriptive investigations have yielded consistent results, which have prompted that email represents a hybrid combination of spoken and written language (Gimenez, 2000, pp. 237-251), which stylistically tends to be close to telephone talk, faxes and letters (Pajzs, 1996; Crystal, 2001; Danet, 2001), and that its “stylistic pendulum swings from the formality of business letters to the informality of e-mails” (Crystal, 2001, p. 64).

Research into native English speakers’ and non-native English speakers’

(Hungarian) emails is important and relevant for a number of reasons. First, despite the research studies mentioned above, there is an obvious lack of authentic business discourse data, especially in the domains where English as a second or foreign language is used for business purposes, although it has been argued that English as the lingua franca of international business communication is used more between non-native English speakers than native English speakers (Louhiala-Salminen, 1996, p. 44). Secondly, in order to teach Hungarian business students the widely accepted norms and forms of email language, it is useful to see to what extent Hungarian businessmen’s writing practices in their native language are similar or different from those of English native speakers. And finally, the current dissertation aims to explore whether Hungarian writers use the same or different rhetorical and language properties when they write in a foreign language or in their native language. Therefore, besides adding to the theory of English business discourse, this study will also contribute to the teaching of practical skills needed for writing email messages, which could ultimately be incorporated into language-teaching materials.

Consequently, first the study aims to propose an analytical tool for a comprehensive linguistic and rhetorical description of business emails as a genre by building on already existing taxonomies (e.g., Swales, 1990 and Bhatia, 1993) and complementing them with additional relevant aspects, such as style and pragmatic properties, drawn from empirical analyses. Secondly, applying the currently proposed

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5 analytical tool, the study aims to offer a rhetorical, structural and linguistic description of a corpus of English and Hungarian business emails. The results of the analysis will be used to formulate theoretical implications for the study of business discourse in general and pedagogical implications for the teaching of Business English in Hungary in particular.

The first chapter of the dissertation sets the scene by presenting an overview of the development of linguistic analysis in ESP. Then genre theory, which constitutes the basis for the present study, is presented with its different perspectives, and the key features associated with it.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 provide the background to genre studies, including business genres, with a special emphasis on business email communication. Chapter 2 introduces the main concepts of genre knowledge, such as communicative purpose, schematic structure, move structure and discourse community. Chapter 3 discusses the cross- cultural aspects in business genres on the basis of related research findings. Chapter 4 outlines the linguistic character of spoken and written language, along with the role that technology has played in shaping its usage. The focal issues in the chapter include email as a new communication genre, embedding the discussion in the larger context of computer-mediated communication, its comparison with other business genres, and the previous studies conducted in this field.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 report on the details of the present research. The analytical tools, Swales’s (1990) CARS (Create a Research Space) Model and Bhatia’s (1993) Promotional Genre Models are presented and discussed in Chapter 5, and also the currently proposed theory- and data-based analytical tool, the so-called EGM (Email Genre Model) is presented, which is argued to be capable of describing the generic structure of business emails in a reliable and valid manner. The chapter also includes the implications of a pilot study and the reliability measures. Chapter 6 elaborates on the method of analysis. The analysis and discussion of the results takes place in Chapter 7.

After the discussion of the limitations of the analysis and implication for further research, the chapter ends with a summary of the main outcomes of the investigation.

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6 Chapter 8 discusses the pedagogical implications of the study outlining the new perspectives in business writing and ideas are suggested for integrating the results of the present study into future pedagogical practices.

The concluding chapter of the dissertation assesses its contribution to previous professional genre theory, the methodology of Contrastive Rhetoric and pedagogical practices.

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7 1 Chapter 1: Overview of linguistic analysis in ESP

1.1 Setting the scene

Although the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has generally been seen as a separate activity within English Language Teaching (ELT), it has always retained its emphasis on practical outcomes, i.e. on preparing learners to communicate effectively in professional situations. If we look back on the history of ESP, we can see that its main concerns have always been, and remain, needs analysis, discourse/text (cf.

1.2) analysis and the teaching of communication strategies, which all prepare students for their study or future work situation.

Therefore, researchers in ESP investigate the structures and meanings of texts, the demands placed by workplace contexts on communicative behaviours, and the pedagogic practices by which these behaviours can be developed. Genres are seen as a central way in which we construct our lives: it is through genres that individuals develop relationships to achieve their goals. As a result, genre studies stress a concern with context, function as well as form, and emphasize the importance of description and analysis of texts (Hyland, 2004).

Recently, the overarching significance of writing in our lives, its multiple roles in social and professional contexts have created many forms of enquiry to help clarify both how writing works and how it should be best taught. The various purposes of writing and the increased complexity of its contexts of use and the diverse backgrounds and needs of those wishing to learn it, all push the study of writing into more thorough analysis and deeper understanding.

In addition, both organisational and personal communication have been revolutionised by the growth of electronic communication technologies, especially by email, which allows more frequent contact and more prolific output of information than was previously possible. This new way of correspondence creates novel challenges for writers as the medium brings a new message style to the workplace which requires control of new combinations of rhetorical and linguistic features to communicate effectively.

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8 This chapter will first make a distinction between discourse and text, as these terms are not interpreted the same way in various sources (e.g. Widdowson, 1996;

Tolcsvai Nagy, 2001; Péter, 2005). Any study of text at a level above the sentence is a discourse study, which may involve the study of cohesive ties between sentences, of paragraph structure, or the structure of the whole texts. Where, however, the focus of the text analysis is on the regularities of structure that distinguish one type of text from another type, is genre analysis.

Also, it will show how the notion of text will be applied in the present study. I will also describe the various stages of linguistic analysis within the context of ESP and then provide an overview of the different perspectives of genre theory as well as the key features associated with it.

1.2 Perspectives on written texts

The study of text and discourse has become an increasingly important area of research over the last decades. The principle difficulty of text analysis, however, lies in the very nature of text, namely that it is a highly complex system of language. It is complex because it is entitled to fulfill various functions, and as such, does not permit the treatment of language merely by itself.

In this opening chapter, some elaboration on the different uses of the terms

“discourse” and “text” is necessary, because in the literature they tend to be used interchangebly (e.g. see Tolcsvai Nagy, 2001, p. 514; de Beaugrande, 1997, p. 61). Some researchers, for example, Cook (1989, p. 6) and Widdowson (1996, p. 127) argue that a text is a physical product of discourse, while discourse is a process leading to the text.

Sanders and Sanders (2006, pp. 597-598) make a distinction between the two concepts by arguing that the term discourse is used as the more general term to refer to both spoken and written language, whereas the term text is generally used to refer to written language.

In line with Sanders and Sanders’ (2006) distinction, as the analysis is confined to written email messages, I will use the term text when referring to these messages.

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9 Despite the intensive research interest, Discourse Analysis has not yet produced a coherent taxonomy of text types. There are two basic approaches to text typology: formal and functional. Formalist models propose linguistic and extralinguistic criteria to identify text types including concepts such as medium, degree of spontaneity, monological/dialogical nature, channel, time continuity, hierarchy relation between participants, linguistic patterns of beginning and ending, conventionality of rhetorical organisation and characteristic thematic content (for more details see Tolcsvai Nagy, 1996). According to the functionalist approach (e.g., Enkvist, 1978; Hasan, 1984;

Paltridge, 1997), texts are viewed as meaningful configurations of signs, but in order for these to become real communicative occurences, de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) claim that they must meet certain “standards of textuality” (p. 3). Textuality, in de Beaugrande’s (1980) definition, refers to the “status of a linguistic entity or configuration of entities as a text of a natural language” (p. 17).

In an ideal text typology it is essential to combine these two perspectives because both the formal and functional criteria represent a socio-culturally determined set of rules regulating acceptable text types in different situations. Therefore in the dissertation an attempt has been made to integrate both of these approaches.

1.3 Linguistic analyses in ESP

ESP has developed in parallel with the development of communicative approaches to language teaching (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987), yet attempts to define ESP through the communicative nature of its teaching has often led to a questioning of the difference of ESP from English for General Purposes. The question arises whether ESP is a truly distinctive branch of ELT with a greater sensitivity to the students’ needs, or not.

While the specified needs arising from needs analysis relate to activities that students need to carry out, a key assumption of ESP is that these activities generate and depend on registers, genres and associated language that students need to be able to manipulate in order to carry out the given activity.

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10 ESP analysts have generally been interested in an above-average incidence or even lack of certain linguistic forms in the texts under study, starting from the early register analysis associated with the identification of key grammatical elements of scientific communication (e.g., Barber, 1962; Gustaffson, 1975; Grabe, 1987; Biber, 1988; Salager-Meyer et al., 1989; Halliday, 1994) to rhetorical analysis associated with Lackstrom, Selinker, and Trimble (1973), Tarone et al. (1981), and Malcolm (1987), through to the dominant approach of today, namely genre analysis (e.g., Swales, 1990;

Bhatia, 1993).

The value of all these approaches to text analysis are that they start out from the idea that the texts used in particular specialist environments, be that academic writing, business or other professional activity, have particular characteristics that distinguish them from other texts.

The various approaches to the early description of language in ESP are displayed in Table 2, as well as the main criticism voiced against them in the literature. In what follows I will integrate the benefits of these approaches in the analysis of the business emails.

In frequency studies (e.g. Barber, 1962) statistical methods play an important role in selecting an inventory of typical lexical items for teaching/learning purposes. As a consequence, the ability to use certain key grammatical features is vital and other grammatical features of little relevance can be ignored. According to the findings of frequency studies, it is the word and phrase levels of texts that yield the best results for the analyses of grammatical features (Robinson, 1991, p.23).

A significant shift of in linguistic analysis was represented by the appearance of rhetorical analysis (e.g. Selinker, Lackstrom and Trimble, 1973), in which not the frequency but the reason for the choice of particular features was important in the text. In this approach, writing is seen as a nested pattern of units where lower-level rhetorical functions combine to make up higher-level functions. The focus is thus on the text rather than on the sentence, and also on the writer’s purpose rather than on the form.

However, it has often proved difficult to unambiguously classify texts in this way, and in particular to identify the syntactic and lexical expressions. Nevertheless, rhetorical analysis has been important in elucidating some of the characteristics of scientific

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11 discourse, which has established the basis for the teaching of English for Science and Technology (EST).

Studies The scope of analysis Main criticism in the literature Register studies

Barber (1962) Gustaffson (1975)

Grabe (1987)

Biber (1988)

Salager-Meyer et al.

(1989)

Halliday (1994)

Frequent occurence of forms and structures at word and phrase levels Text selection (law) is made on the basis of topic

The frequencies and grammatical forms are related to text type and rhetorical purpose

An automatic analysis of written linguistic features (84 variables)

The variation of 17 grammatical variables (tense, voice and form) The relationship between text and context depends on the field, tenor and mode.

Descriptive not explanatory-the two should be combined Science is not a homogeneous linguistic entity;writers’ purpose is more determant than topic Not the frequency of features but the reason for the choice is important in the text.

It is questionable whether this program is appropriate for second language texts Discipline is the primary distinguishing factor between texts

Register refers to broad fields of activity so it is difficult to operationalise

Rhetorical studies Selinker, Lackstrom and Trimble (1970; 1973) Tarone et al. (1981)

Malcolm (1987)

The relationship between

grammatical choice and rhetorical function in written EST

The frequency of active and passive forms in 2 astrophysics journal papers.

Tense usage in 20 scientific articles

A clear description of EST rhetoric is lacking

Their generalisations (e.g.

predominance of active to passive forms) hold for professional papers only.

The database is too small; only temporal and rhetorical and not textual-based constraints have been accounted for

Genre analysis Swales (1981; 1990) Bhatia (1993)

The rhetorical functions of RA

Typical patterns in promotional genres

Textual boundaries are intuitive;

no guidelines for the transfer to other genres

-

Table 2: Approaches to linguistic analysis for ESP from the beginnings to the 90s

Abbreviations: EST:English for Science and Technology; RA: Research article

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12 In the 1990s attention moved to genre analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993), which moulded textual awareness with a much broader view of rhetorical considerations governing grammatical choice. Grammar is thus seen by these studies as a resource for communication rather than rules for ordering forms.

Both Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993) put forward various models for genre analysis: Swales in the field of academic discourse and Bhatia in business, academic, and legal genres. As this study wishes to contribute to the line of research in genre analysis, in Section 1.4 the major approaches to genre theory will be discussed in more detail.

The above historical development in the field of linguistic analysis indicates clearly that analysis has steadily progressed in the last thirty years or so from pure surface description to a thicker description of texts, which entails the socio-cultural, institutional aspects of text construction and its linguistic expressions in order to answer the question, why specific discourse genres are written and used by the specialist communities the way they are.

1.4 The various stages of development of language use

As we have seen in the previous section, linguistic analysis and description are regarded as a kind of prerequisite to the development and design of any language teaching and learning activity in the context of ESP. Although the usefulness of linguistic descriptions for language teaching has not changed in the last few decades, the nature of linguistic analysis has developed considerably. Bhatia (2002, pp. 21-22), for example, argues that analyses of linguistic data for pedagogical applications have gone through a variety of stages in the past four decades. One way of looking at these varying perceptions of language description can be by analysing the way in which texts relate to contexts, as Table 3 below shows.

According to Bhatia (2002), in the first stage, the characterisation of statistically significant lexico-grammatical features and the study of textualisation in discourse took place, i.e., a characterisation of values these features of form realise in discourse. These analyses were also influenced by variation studies due to the interest of many linguists in applied linguistics and language teaching (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens, 1964).

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13 The second stage extended the textualisation to the study of macrostructures in texts, thereby bringing into focus the notion of discourse structure. Focus on patterns of organization in written discourse triggered a more serious interest in the analysis of larger

Language Description as

Text

What features of lexico-grammar are statistically and/or functionally distinctive?

Context: narrowly configured in terms of textual links Genre

Why do we use the language the way we do and what makes this possible?

Context: more specifically configured in terms of disciplinary cultures Social Practice

How do we relate language to social structures, social identities, and social practices?

Context: broadly configured in terms of socio-cultural realities

Table 3: Language Description adopted from Bhatia (2002)

stretches of discourse, which also led to the identification of more global structures in various discourse types (e.g. Hoey, 1983; Widdowson, 1973; van Dijk, 1988). This kind of engagement with the structuring of discourse was taken further by the analysis of text as genre (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993), relating discourse structures to communicative purposes the genres in question served.

In the third stage, the focus shifted from surface to deep structure of discourse, connecting texts to social practice by shifting focus more centrally to the study of social structures, identities and discourse systems (e.g. Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1994).

Many of these developments can be characterised in terms of a quest for thicker descriptions of language use, often incorporating, and many times even going beyond, the immediate context of situation. This quest for thicker descriptions of language use has become known as genre analysis. Along with the grounded description of language use in educational and professional settings, linguistic analyses have also become much more than mere descriptions, they attempt to offer explanation for a specific use of language in institutionalised social, educational, academic and professional settings.

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14 However, it is obvious from Table 3 that neither a very narrowly configured context, nor a very broadly configured one is likely to make a textual description effective, as they may make insights less relevant to the teaching and learning of a language. Ideally, one may need to position oneself somewhere in the middle, looking at the use of language as genre to achieve non-linguistic objectives, thus establishing a balance between the study of linguistic form and the study of context (Bhatia, 2002) . The current study will follow this view and attempt to offer a grounded description of language use in one particular professional setting.

1.5 Theoretical background to Genre Theory

After the presentation of the development of linguistic studies, now let us turn from the object of analysis, i.e. the text, to the context in which it is constructed, used, and interpreted.

The study of genres—the fusion of content, purpose and form of communicative actions—stretches back hundreds of years to the beginnings of self-reflective human communication. Greek philosophers and orators recognized that the content of the message is not always its most important aspect; rather, the delivery, the context, and the rhetorical structure all play complementary roles in the subtle but profound act of one human being transferring information to another and thereby creating meaning from that transfer. Therefore, the concept of genre is not only critical to communication, but, indeed, worthy of study in its own right.

In modern genre theory (e.g., Hyland, 2004a), it is a widely accepted view that the features of a similar group of texts depend on the social context of their creation and use, and that those features can be described in a way that relates a text to others like it and to the choices and constraints acting on text producers. Language is seen as embedded in (and constitutive of) social realities, since it is through recurrent use of conventionalised forms that individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done.

Genre theorists, therefore, locate participant relationships at the heart of language use and assume that every successful text will display the writer’s awareness of its context and the readers who form part of that context. Genres, then, are “the effects of the

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15 action of individual social agents acting both within the bounds of their history and the constraints of particular contexts, and with a knowledge of existing generic types” (Kress, 1989, p. 10).

Therefore, texts are a good starting point for understanding and teaching students to communicate effectively in writing, however, the writers’ sense of who they are and who they are writing for also play a crucial role in understanding different genres. The next section sets out to discuss the various interpretations of genre, which can enable teachers to see genre as a useful concept pulling together language, content and context, by offering them a means of presenting students with explicit and systematic explanations of the ways writing works to communicate (de Beaugrande, 1980).

1.5.1 Definitions of Genre

One of the challenges of studying genre in general is that there has never been, nor is there presently, a consensus on what a genre is, what qualifies for genre status, how genres work, how we work with genres, how genres work with each other, or how best to identify, construe, or study genres (Hyland, 2000). As a result, the definitions of genre vary depending on the tradition from within which a researcher is working.

Some researchers take genres and their attributes as given, while others aim to discover them in the communicative activities of people engaged in a variety of endeavors. As a result, many genre researchers choose a definition of genre useful to the investigation at hand as one of the first steps of the research process. Such a multiplicity of definitions is an indication of the richness and complexity of this concept, and of its fruitfulness.

In general though, most definitions include some consideration of the form of a document and sometimes of expected content. Most also include the notion of intended communicative purpose. Finally, most include the notion of social acceptance; that is, a document is of a particular genre to the extent that it is recognized as such within a given discourse community. In fact, successful membership in any number of social contexts requires a fluency in the genres in use in that context.

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16 It is customary to identify three broad, overlapping approaches to genre (Hyon, 1996; Johns, 2002), each of which conceptualises and analyses genre in a different way:

1. the Australian work in the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL);

2. the New Rhetoric studies developed in North American composition contexts;

3. the teaching of English for Specific Purposes.

In the following I will describe these approaches in more detail in order to translate the understandings of genre into the teaching of business email communication.

1.5.1.1 Systemic Functional Linguistics

In the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach, genre can be defined as “a staged, goal oriented social process” (Martin, 1992, p. 505), emphasizing the purposeful, interactive, and sequential character of different genres and the ways that language is linked to context. As Martin (2000) describes:

In functional linguistics, genre theory is a theory of how we use language to live;

it tries to describe the ways in which we mobilize language- how out of all the things we might do with language, each culture chooses just a few, and enacts them over and over again- slowly adding to the repertoire as needs arise, and slowly dropping things that are not much use. Genre theory is a theory of the borders of our social world, and thus our familiarity with what to expect (p. 120).

SFL research has therefore stressed the social purposes of genres and the rhetorical structures that have evolved to serve these purposes. Genres are social processes because members of a culture interact to achieve them. They are goal-oriented because they have evolved to achieve things, and they are staged because meanings are made in steps, and it usually takes writers more than one step to reach their goals.

A comprehensive analysis of any professional genre, however, must consider and integrate both text-internal as well as text external aspects of language use, particularly the conventions that make a particular genre possible, as well as a specific professional practice, and perhaps more appropriately, the specific disciplinary culture that motivates these practices. Any theory or framework that chooses to underemphasize any of these aspects of language use is likely to miss input which can be of potential value to a good

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17 understanding of a specific genre used as part of the professional activity to achieve a specific disciplinary objective.

The relationship of texts and contexts is central to this framework (Hyland, 2002, p. 26) as interactions can only be understood by seeing them against their social setting.

Each context is seen as having the possibility for a range of possible texts. Texts are seen as being connected to particular contexts at two levels: register and genre. Registers are realized by field (the social activity), tenor (the relationships of the participants) and mode (the role of language). Register variables basically explain our intuitions that we do not use language in the same ways to write or speak.

The second level of text-context is genre, where linguistic choices are influenced by the writer’s social purpose in using language. Therefore, genre is a more is a more concrete expression of field, tenor and mode, involving conventions for organizing messages.

However, SFL does not distinguish between genre and text type. The term macrogenre is sometimes used to refer to larger, more complex genres that combine more basic elemental genres (Martin, 1992). A macrogenre, such as news discourse, can be composed of several elemental genres (e.g. news stories, or episodes) and in the same way, elemental genres can contribute to more than one kind of macrogenre.

In addition to specifying key genres, SFL researchers (e.g., Martin, 1992;

Rothery, 1996) have identified the typical features and stages of the texts according to linguistic functions or the writer’s rhetorical purpose. For example, the register of entries in travel guidebooks might vary according to the writer’s relationship with the intended readership (a formal relationship with erudite connoisseurs of, say, art history and architecture, or an informal relationship with student backpackers); the subject matter covered by the entries (fields such as food, wine, history, architecture); and the mode (usually written but possibly with some appeal to spoken discourse in the less formal realizations). None of these situational variables takes into consideration why tourist guidebooks come to be written; in other words, their context of culture.

The reason why this approach is relevant in the dissertation is that, similarly to systemic-functional linguists, through observation of a number of related communicative events, the identification of the main communicative purposes in the business emails are

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18 sought and then their chronological order and optional or obligatory presence is decided, which then leads to the “generic structure potential” (Halliday and Hasan, 1989, pp. 63–

69) of a set of communicative events.

1.5.1.2 New Rhetoric

The second main perspective on genre, New Rhetoric (NR) differs considerably from SFL, as it gives less emphasis to the form of discourse and more to the action it is used to accomplish (Miller, 1994). In other words, although genres involve regularities and conventions, they are nevertheless much more “flexible, plastic, and free” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 79) than SFL would allow.

New Rhetoric embraces a number of perspectives that address the issue of how people know how to write, what they write, it devotes more attention to investigating the ways how linguistic similarities are related to regularities of social activity (Dias & Pare, 2000). This school of genre analysts, therefore, situates genres in a thick ethnographic description of the communities that give rise to them, whether these communities are tax accounting firms (Devitt, 1991), bank offices (Smart, 1993), or scientific researchers (Bazerman, 1988; Myers, 1990).

Bazerman (1988) looked at the gradual evolution of the experimental article in science and accounted for its changing form and structure in the evolving character and activities of the academic communities that have increasingly come to communicate through research papers. For Bazerman, genres are sets of shared expectations among both readers and writers. By reading formal cues, readers come to know what to expect from a given text, what situation it is likely a response to, and, thus, engage certain strategies of reading and not others.

For New Rhetoricians, then, understanding genres involves not only describing their lexico-grammatical forms and rhetorical patterns but also investigating their cultural and institutional contexts. At the same time, textual regularities are not ignored in this approach, but they are regarded as evidence of how people respond to routine situations in ways that differ by culture and by community.

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19 Thus, NR research has examined such issues as the social impact of transferring genres into new contexts with different purposes (Freedman & Adam, 2000); and the study of genres in the workplace (Pare, 2000). Researchers have used mainly ethnographic tools, as well as analyses of texts to provide thick descriptions of the contexts that surround genres, and have argued that teaching genres in isolation from the contexts in which they have meaning is undesirable.

From this social perspective, a writer’s choices are always context-dependent, motivated by variations in social activity, in writer–reader relations, and by constraints on the progress of the interaction (Martin, Christie & Rothery, 1987). As a result, New Rhetoricians argue that teachers cannot expect weak writers to improve simply by equipping them with the strategies of good writers. Not only are such strategies only part of the process, but they too are likely to vary with context. Instead, we need to explore ways of scaffolding students’ learning and using knowledge of language to guide them towards a conscious understanding of target genres and the ways language creates meanings.

Although the New Rhetoric school has been less concerned with establishing a clear pedagogic framework, and has preferred to leave any teaching applications implicit, its emphasis on the socially constructed nature of genre has helped unpack some of the complex relations between text and context and the ways that one reshapes the other. In this approach emphasis is given to raising students’ consciousness of contextual features and the assumptions and aims of the communities who use the genres in order to provide a critical understanding of rhetorical features and their effectiveness (Bazerman, 1988, p.

323).

1.5.1.3 The ESP View of Genre

The third approach to genre analysis, the teaching of English for Specific Purposes, which frames the present research, tends to steer between the two orientations discussed earlier. Like NR, ESP employs notions of dialogism and contextual situatedness, but it also draws on SFL understandings of text structure, and on SFL principles of pedagogy. As Hyland (2004) points out, ESP tends to favour a more top-

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20 down approach to genre and a synthesis of different models of learning and discourse; the ESP approach is more linguistic than NR and more oriented to the role of social communities than SFL (p. 44).

ESP has always been interested in genre as a tool for understanding and teaching the different kinds of writing required of non-native English speakers in academic and professional contexts. As a result, ESP investigates the structures and meanings of texts, and tries to develop pedagogic applications by which these practices can be best taught.

Unlike SFL, ESP analysts do not see genres as linguistic strategies for achieving general rhetorical goals, their interest is in the communicative needs of particular academic and professional groups. Genres are therefore the property of the communities that use them rather than of the wider culture.

Although ESP is regarded as a separate approach to genre studies, some ESP scholars draw from both SFL and NR (Johns, 2002, p. 7). For example, Swales’s (1990) Genre Analysis looks at text in its social context, merging various disciplines, such as linguistics, applied linguistics, pedagogy, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, sociology, and cultural anthropology. Its aim is twofold: first, to synthesize already existing genre studies and second, to offer an approach to the analysis and teaching of academic and research English.

Genre being a very complex phenomenon, Swales (1990) provides the following working definition comprising the concepts of communicative purpose, discourse community, rhetorical action, patterns of similarity, structure, style, content, and audience:

A genre comprises a class of communicative events the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style.

Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience.

If all high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community.The genre names inherited and produced by discourse communities and imported by others constitute valuable ethnographic communication, but typically need further validation (p. 58).

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21 From this definition we can see that the use of language in conventionalised communicative settings gives expression to a set of communicative goals of specialised disciplinary and social groups, which in turn establish relatively stable structural forms and, to some extent, even constrain the use of lexico-grammatical resources. Often such constraints can also be attributed to variations in disciplinary practices.

Genres in organizational communication are defined by Yates and Orlikowski (1992) as socially recognized types of communicative actions (such as memos, reports, meetings, proposals, recommendation letters, emails, etc.), which are habitually invoked in response to a recurrent situation. Similarly to Swales (1990), they argue that a genre is identified by its socially recognized purpose and shared characteristics of form. The purpose of a genre refers to the social motives, themes and topics, which are constructed and recognized in the communication (and not to the individual’s private motives for communication). Form refers to observable aspects of the communication, such as communication medium (e.g., pen and paper, telephone or CMC), structural features (e.g., text formatting devices such as lists and structured fields) and linguistic features (e.g., level of formality, specialized vocabulary or technical or legal jargon) (Yates &

Orlikowski, 1992).

Delving into the complexity of organizational genres, Orlikowski and Yates (1994) further argue that the set of genres that are routinely enacted by members of a community constitute a genre repertoire. Thus, a genre repertoire reflects the common knowledge, expectations and norms (derived from the organizational and broader cultural context) that members of the community share about communication (Orlikowski &

Yates, 1994).

In line with Swales, Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) also emphasize the dynamic nature of genres and point out that

genres are inherently dynamic rhetorical structures that can be manipulated according to conditions of use, and that genre knowledge is therefore best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary cultures (p. 6).

In addition to this, Berkenkotter and Huckin stress the significance of both form and content, which influence the development of a genre in various ways:

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22 epistemologically, in terms of the audience’s background knowledge, the newness of the genre, and the kairos or rhetorical timing.

Furthermore, they have formulated a framework that summarizes the prevalent aspects of this new concept of genre and they claim that any consideration of genre should take into account five principles: dynamism (genres are dynamic responses to rhetoric situations and change over time), situatedness (genres are situated in the activities of daily life, including the activities of the workplace), form and content (a writer’s genre knowledge includes an understanding of which formal conventions and informational content are appropriate to the rhetorical situation), duality of structure (agents both produce genres, and are constrained/encouraged to reproduce the generic structure), and community ownership (genres can only be understood in the context of the discourse communities which “own” them) (pp. 4-24).

Using communicative purpose associated with a specific rhetorical situation as a privileged criterion, genre theory combines the advantages of a more general view of language use on the one hand, and its very specific realisation on the other. In this sense, genre analysis is narrow in focus and broad in vision.

Although genres are associated with typical socio-rhetorical situations and, in turn, shape future responses to similar situations, they have always been sites of either stability or, on the contrary, of a change. It may happen, for example, that a person is required to respond to a changing socio-cognitive need, when he is expected to negotiate his response in the light of established conventions, since genres do not change over time in response to changing socio-cognitive needs. Alternatively, Bhatia (1993) argues that a person may intend to communicate private intentions, manipulate institutionalised generic forms within the rhetorical context of a socially recognized communicative purpose.

Apart from the conventions, Connor, Precht and Upton (2002) assume that genres also have cultural expectations and when a writer moves between cultures with the same genre, some relearning of the genre must take place in order to correctly negotiate the cultural differences within the same genre. In this way, writing for a new cultural group presupposes the need to relearn the genre within that cultural group.

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23 Genre recognition involves not only identifying typical communicative practice, but also typical participants and their stock of knowledge of how to deal with typical situations in their social community. Swales (2004) has used the metaphors of ’frame’,

‘standard’, ‘institution’, ‘biological species’, ‘families’ and ‘speech acts’ to variously refer to the engendering, constitutive, constraining functions, as well as the dynamic and elusive nature of genre.

Like the SFL tradition, ESP genre studies are motivated by teaching outcomes.

The present study adopts the ESP approach to genre where the communicative purpose controls discoursal and lexico-grammatical choices by assigning a pragmatic function to a particular section of language and build(ing) the schematic structure through which this communicative purpose is achieved. Therefore, business emails in the study are analyzed to see how a particular aspect of the real communicative world works in order to translate these understandings into the classroom.

1.6 Summary

This chapter has set the scene for the present research by providing an overview of linguistic and genre analyses, as the two major aspects of exploring the specific features of business writing, and also the way the different approaches conceptualize genre. Each of the three conceptions of genre (SFL, NR and ESP view) discussed in this chapter sees language as a central feature of human behaviour. Language, through genres, helps to construct meaning and social context, rather than being merely a tool for transmitting ideas. As we can see, genre theory, in spite of these seemingly different orientations, covers a lot of common ground, some of which include the following:

 Genres are reflections of disciplinary cultures and have integrity of their own, which can be identified with reference to textual and discursive (text-internal) factors, or contextual and disciplinary (text-external) factors.

 Genres cut across disciplinary boundaries, however, they also display subtle variations across a range of disciplines (see Biber, 1988). Often these variations appear to be more significant in the way lexico-grammatical resources and

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24 rhetorical strategies are exploited to give expressions to discipline-specific concepts.

 The most important feature of language use within a genre is the emphasis on conventions, which gives expression to a specific set of communicative goals of specialised disciplinary groups, which in turn establishes relatively stable structural forms.

 Using communicative purpose associated with a specific rhetorical situation, genre theory combines the advantages of a more general view of language use on the one hand, and its very specific realisation, on the other (Swales, 1990, p. 58;

Bhatia, 1993).

 Genres are not static but are inherently dynamic rhetorical structures that can be manipulated according to conditions of use.

 Expert members of the disciplinary and professional communities can express

’private intentions’ within the structures of socially acceptable communicative norms.

While these approaches are united by a common attempt to describe and explain regularities of purpose, form, and situated social action, they clearly differ in the emphasis they give to text or context, the research methods they employ, and the types of pedagogies they encourage.

Out of all these orientations, ESP genre approaches have perhaps had the most influence on L2 writing instruction worldwide, SFL, however, perhaps offers theoretically the most sophisticated and pedagogically best developed approach of the three. Basically, Halliday’s theory systematically links language to its contexts of use, studying how language varies from one context to another and, within that variation, the underlying patterns which organise texts so they are culturally and socially recognised as performing particular functions.

By analyzing samples of authentic business emails therefore can supply crucial information about relevant content, format and language for teaching business email communication. This will enable students to participate in particular contexts with confidence and with success.

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25 A summary of the studies reviewed in this chapter, with their main outcomes that offer a background to this investigation can be found in Table 4.

Studies Focus Main outcome

Miller (1984) Rhetorical structure of genres The aim of GA is to relate the linguistic features to the actions Swales (1981,1990) Rhetorical structure of research

articles Consistency in CP; genres cut

across disciplinary boundaries Martin, Christie and Rothery

(1987) Goal-oriented social processes

in genres CP is mutually understood by

members of the community Bazerman (1988) The evolution of scientific report Formal cues help the reader

expect certain text types Martin (1992) Macrogenre vs. Elemental genre Macrogenres (e.g. editorials)are

composed of elemental genres such as exposition

Yates and Orlikowski (1992) Organizational communication A genre is identified by its socially recognized purpose and shared characteristics of form.

Bhatia (1993) Rhetorical structure of

promotional genres Private intentions can be

communicated within the context Orlikowski and Yates (1994) Genre repertoires A genre repertoire reflects the

common knowledge, expectations and norms of a community Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) Formal and generic features of

abstracts

RS can be manipulated according to use, disciplinary cultures;

generic text model cannot explain the quality of abstracts Freedman and Adam (2000) The flexible and dynamic nature

of generic structure Consciousness raising is important in pedagogy

Pare (2000) Workplace genres Genres cannot be taught without

context Henry and Roseberry (2001) Rhetorical structure of letters of

application

Not all elements of a text are obligatory, some are optional Connor, Precht and Upton (2002) Cultural expectations in genres Relearning of the genre is

necessary

Swales (2004) Genres and sub-genres The presence or absence of certain textual features cannot and does not define a genre.

Table 4: Summary of main theoretical genre studies relevant for the study

Abbreviations: GA: genre analysis; RS: rhetorical structure; CP: communicative purpose

In sum, the exploration and description of these patterns and their variations has been the focus of genre theory, which can provide learners with access to socially valued genres.

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26 2 Chapter 2: Genre knowledge in ESP: Definition of main concepts

2.1 Setting the scene

This chapter explores the main concepts of genre knowledge, focusing on what writers need to know to produce effective texts: communicative purpose and schematic structure, move structure, and, last but not least, the discourse community.

To be part of any social or professional event, individuals must be familiar with the genres they need in that event. Growing familiarity with a genre, therefore, develops knowledge that is partly cognitive, based on our prior knowledge of similar texts, and partly social, shared with other text users in particular circumstances. This means that we might be able to draw parallels with related purposes and schemas or texts that we have experienced while modifying and evolving our use of them for new situations.

While “schemas are generalized collections of knowledge of past experiences which are organized into related knowledge groups and are used to guide our behaviors in familiar situations” (Nishida, 1999, p. 755), communicative purpose plays a significant role in determining how we, language users employ language to achieve a particular goal in a certain social context.

The semantic structure of texts can be characterized at two levels: a macrostructural and a microstructural level (Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978). The macrostructure constitutes the global level of the text and characterizes it as a whole.

The microstructure, on the other hand, is the local level of the text, the structure of the individual propositions and their relations.

Text patterning, i.e., the pragmatic disposition at the macro level, can be analysed using the notion of move, which is “ a structural unit that relates both to the writer’s purpose and to the content that s/he wishes to communicate”. The step, on the other hand, is “a lower text unit than the move that provides a detailed perspective on the options open to the writer in setting out the moves” (Dudley-Evans and St. John, 1998, p. 89).

The two major identifying features of genres and thus notions widely used in the analysis of discourse patterns (Bhatia, 1993; Longacre, 1992; Mauranen, 1993b; Swales, 1990).

Analyzing the move structure of a text would thus mean to assign a pragmatic function to a stretch of language and to build the schematic structure through which its

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27 communicative purpose is achieved. Then, if this schematic structure is the result of the generic conventions developed by a discourse community in response to recurrent rhetorical needs, cultural differences are still possible in the way moves are organized to achieve the specific communicative goal of the text.

All these notions mentioned above are central to all of the major schools of genre analysis (see 1. 5) today, i.e., that of the Systemic Functional School (cf., e.g., Martin, 1992; Halliday & Hasan 1989), the North American New Rhetoric tradition (cf., e.g., Bazerman, 1994; Miller, 1984) and the UK-based English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition (cf., e.g., Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990).

By taking a linguistic perspective on the use and production of genres, the authors naturally focus on what triggers a particular text structure and a host of conventionalized verbal rhetorical strategies. Therefore, genre analysts attempt to describe the conventions of linguistic behaviour associated with a particular communicative purpose in a particular rhetorical context.

The present dissertation adopts an ESP approach to genre analysis (cf. also Dudley-Evans and St. John, 1998) and it, thus, aims at describing conventionalised language use in a particular rhetorical context. In this school of genre analysis, communicative purpose is considered to control discoursal and lexico-grammatical choices. Genres are, thus, as Hyon (1996, p. 695) notes, “defined by their formal properties as well as by their communicative purposes within social contexts”. The following sections will explore the main concepts of genre knowledge one by one.

2.2 Communicative purpose

Business communication is a purposeful social activity. “Purposeful” means that as in any kind of communication, it serves to manifest a goal or an intent which, however ritual it may be, expresses a given community’s way of making things happen through language. Given the goal oriented nature of all human communication, the self-assertive character of manifesting intent verbally, and the manipulative character of business dealings in general, communicative purpose provides the rationale for a genre and exerts a constraining influence on what it typically contains and how it is written.