| Some researches show that owing to the different cultural patterns, non-native speakers of English often transfer their thought patterns or writing styles of their mother tongues to the second language writing. With the rapid development of globalization and integration of the world economy, especially with China's entry into WTO (World Trade Organization), the international trade transaction becomes more and more frequent than ever before. English sales promotion letters play an important part in companies'promoting their products to the foreign customers. So the author takes English sales promotion letters written by native speakers of English and those written by Chinese as research objectives to find the similarities and differences between them and gives reasonable explanations for the differences.Sixty English sales promotion letters were collected and two corpora of letters to be used as the database for this study were established. Chinese Corpus (CC) was made up of 30 English sales promotion letters written by Chinese writers and Native Speakers'Corpus (NSC) consisted of 30 English sales promotion letters written by native speakers of English. The present study was designed to apply ESP genre analysis to analyze the structures, that is, moves and strategies and some linguistic features.Based on the Seven-Move Model of analyzing English sales promotion letters proposed by Bhatia, the author employed a Modified Move Model to analyze the structures of the English sales promotion letters in the two corpora in terms of their moves and strategies respectively. As for the linguistic features, the author used the software package Wordsmith Tools 4.0 to generate the wordlist of obligatory moves and analyzed the salient linguistic features of these moves. Chi-Square Test (Fisher Exact Test) and T-Test (Independent Samples Test) were used to analyze the results of the comparison between the English sales promotion letters in the two corpora for any difference in the structures and the linguistic features.The main results from this study are: (1) there are 8 moves in CC among which Move 2, Move 3 and Move 6 are obligatory moves while there are 7 moves appearing in NSC, among which obligatory moves are Move 3 and Move 6. Significant differences are found in Move 1, Move 2, Move 4, Move 7 and Move 8. (2) There are only two moves adopting different strategies to realize the purpose of move and the significant difference is found in Strategy 3 and Strategy 4 of Move 2. (3) As for the salient linguistic analysis, significant differences exist in the use of first and second personal pronoun. The differences in two corpora come from either the writers'ethnic cultural thought pattern, language proficiency or the influence of subconscious language transfer from their mother tongue.The present comparative study helps the Chinese writers better understand the features of English sales promotion letters written by native speakers and more importantly, it has implication for the teaching and learning of business English letters in China. |
