Genre Analysis Of The White Paper Introductions

Regarded as a recent development in discourse analysis, genre analysis is evolved from the surface-level description of language to the deep-level explanation and has concerned itself most with describing the higher-level organization and structures of written or spoken texts, aiming to study their communicative purposes and strategies in using language.Within the theoretical framework of genre analysis, the present study investigates the White Paper Introduction as a genre from systemic-functional approach. Based on Hasan's model, we probe into the generic structure potential of WPI by identifying its obligatory and optional elements together with the underlying reason for such a format. The study reveals that WPI usually contains eleven generic elements, of which Social Situation and Giving the Purpose are obligatory element and the rest nine remain optional. Then after having analyzed the transitivity and Themes manipulated by the authors of WPI within the framework of Halliday's SFG, we conclude that relational processes are the most predominant as they are reflective of what the authors consider to be the most important Tokens and Values in the source article, and the priority of ideational Themes, thematic patterns with derived Themes, thematic pattern indicated by generic elements and combination of three basic thematic patterns are motivated by the function of WPI.It is hoped that the research findings can offer some guidance to the writing of all kinds of introductions and more extensively to the other styles of English writings.