A Study Of Intertextuality Of Intra-company E-mail Messages

This thesis is a case study which analyzes the intertextual relations in intra-company E-mail messages of Younger Dress Co. Ltd. under the umbrella of effective business communication. It aims to explore the relationship between intertextuality of intra-company E-mail messages and effective business communication.Intertextuality is a very important text building strategy and it can be applied to not only literary discourses but also business discourses. However, few studies have been done in this field and no systematical theories which relates effective business communication to intertextuality can be found, thus, a new theoretical framework which based on the theory of interetxtuality and the theory of effective business writing is built by the author and a survey is carried out to test the validity of this framework among 400 employees who write English intra-company E-mail messages everyday. The result of this survey supports the assumption that there is a strong and positive relationship between interetxtuality of intra-company E-mails and effective business communication.In thethsis, seven types of intertextual relations are employed to investigate those intra-company E-mail messages from Younger Dress Co. Ltd.. The result shows that in those intra-company E-mail messages these seven types of intertextual relations are all employed and the communication is effective.