A Genre-based Analysis Of Letters Of Claims In Systemic Functional Perspective

When troubles and conflicts in trade happen among companies in different countries, the letters of claims (LOC) are used very commonly in the international business communication. This thesis tries to analyze the generic structures of the ninety native English letters of claims, with the aim of illustrating how the writers of this particular discourse fulfill their communicative purposes best, what kind of strategy choices they make, and why it is in such a case.To satisfy this aim, we adopt the approaches based on the genre study (Swales, 1990;Bhatia, 1993;Hasan, 1989) to explore the moves and the structure levels of the text. Hasan's GSP model is exploited to identify and describe the obligatory and optional components in the texts as well as the sequencing and repetition of the structural elements in the textual organizations. Some detailed explanations are given on the arrangements of the generic structures and move distributions according to the writers' specific communicative purposes. The research also draws on the three metafunctions in Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to find out some linguistic strategies associated with certain moves on its lexico-grammatical level, which is a complementary part to the methodology of the genre study.Through the analysis, there are 11 moves identified in the LOC, which serve the two main communicative purposes of the LOC: informing, and persuading. The GSP for the LOC we worked out differ to some extent in the three claiming stages, reflecting the writers' flexible strategy shifts. On the lexico-grammatical level, linguistic tactics are found in an amount from the systemic functional perspective, which are used to arouse the sufficient attention from the readers and urge them to accept the claim. The research reveals that there exist some conventionalized structures and distinctive language features in LOC. The findings of the study are mainly devoted to the guidelines for LOC writing. Moreover, the results from the interpretation may provide some implications for pedagogical methods, such as ESP teaching in particular, and help students enhance their linguistic techniques in business letter writing.