| his dissertation examines the discourse properties of contemporary Turkish commercial correspondence. The primary data used consist of approximately 450 memoranda (internal correspondence) and fax messages (external correspondence) associated with four different Turkish companies selected to represent a range of sectors, sizes, and management styles. The text and discourse analyses are supported by text-based interviews with informants from these companies.;The linguistic analysis is first framed within a socio-historical context of the emergence of the private sector in Turkey, and then within recent linguistic and literacy trends, and finally within the context of corporate cultures. These frames of contextualization reveal how corporate culture can affect certain aspects of communicative practice, while also indicating that certain other aspects are inherently Turkish. One particular strong general influence in the memoranda came from public sector bureaucratic styles.;The rhetorical analysis focuses mainly on requests in both memoranda and fax messages. Requests in Turkish are shown to be highly impersonal and relatively indirect. Although the particular strategies preferred for internal or external communication vary, politeness strategies typically depersonalize the requests by avoiding reference to the receiver's agent status; as a result, the company emerges as a discourse participant which is, at times, more prominent than the sender and the receiver. On a syntactic level, one consequence is the heavy use made of passivization, nominalization, and the particles such a... |
