Analysis Of Language Features In Email Writing By Americans And Chinese From Cultural Perspective

Intercultural communication is a relatively new discipline, which is a branch study of sociolinguistics and originates in America. As one of the highlights in sociolinguistics, intercultural communication focuses on all forms of communication between members of racial, ethnic or other cultural groups. Linguistic investigations of cultural differences may date back to the early years of the 20s century. Language varies according to the social identities of people in interactions, their socially defined purpose, social setting and so on. Therefore, relations of power are exercised and enacted in discourse. In order to find out how power is exercised in a hierarchical corporation, the researcher studied the electronic communication within corporations, as it is easily kept record of and has gradually gained prominence in the business world with the economic globalization and the penetration of the Internet. This research is an analysis of the authentic electronic communication of professionals at work in the naturalistic setting of the workplace. The selection of language behaviors under study consist of exchanges of email interaction built around to get things done in the day-to-day business of one international corporation in China.Following the tenets of a critical approach to text analysis, according to Fairclough(1989), the linguistic data for the study is examined for cues and markers that reflect the presence of power relations in language behavior, by means of concordance to elicit empirical evidence from the corpus, as in the hierarchical corporation power is situated as a form of organizational behavior fundamental to the roles and responsibilities of the corporate members.With the globalization, intercultural communication has become the inevitable experience for Chinese people who are embracing people all over the world in its strive for modernization and internationalization. Cultural differences have become great obstacles to intercultural communication. Shared perceptions lead to actions that are regarded as appropriate and effective behaviors within a culture.The core of these shared perceptions is cultural value, existing only in the minds of people, which provides a norm of behaving, thinking, recognizing, socializing, deducing evaluating, and make people orient themselves to it. Cultural value refers to the way people live, the norm people behave, the ideal people want to achieve.On the basis of the value dimensions by Hofstede, the study explores the influencing factors posed by different cultures and further more proposes implications to intercultural communication in order to overcome potential barriers caused by cultural differences. As a qualitative study, this dissertation adopts the methods of consulting relative materials and makes a comparative analysis in order to promote mutual understanding between Chinese and Americans.