‘Could you send us your latest catalogue?’: A local grammar of requesting in English business letters

IF 3.2 1区文学 Q1 LINGUISTICS

English for Specific Purposes Pub Date : 2025-04-24 DOI:10.1016/j.esp.2025.04.001

Lei Zhang , Fuzhi Tong

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This study introduces a local grammar approach to investigating discourse acts in English business texts, demonstrating this with the discourse act of requesting in English business letters. Previous studies on request language in business letters have focused on its pragmatic, rhetorical, and lexical features, paying less attention to the exploration of how concrete meanings are expressed in making requests. Based on a one-million-word English business correspondence corpus, this study adopts a local grammar approach to analyze the semantic patterns for requesting. The results show that requesting in English business letters involves eight specific meanings, forming 16 semantic patterns, i.e. local grammar patterns. These patterns represent the most typical ways of meaning expression for request making in English business letter writing in an easy-to-read and systematic manner, demonstrating local grammar's added methodological value for exploring characteristic patterning of language in ESP/EBP (English for Business Purposes) contexts. The findings of this study can also provide important pedagogical insights for improving ESP/EBP learners' pragmatic competence.

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您能把最新的产品目录寄给我们吗？英语商务信函中的本地请求语法

本研究以商务英语信函中的请求语篇行为为例，介绍了一种地方语法方法来研究商务英语语篇中的语篇行为。以往对商务信函中请求语的研究主要集中在其语用、修辞和词汇特征上，很少关注请求语中具体含义的表达方式。本研究以百万字英语商务函电语料库为基础，采用局部语法方法分析请求的语义模式。结果表明，英语商务信函中的请求涉及8种特定意义，形成16种语义模式，即局部语法模式。这些模式以易于阅读和系统的方式代表了英语商务信函中请求的最典型的意义表达方式，展示了本地语法在探索ESP/EBP（商务英语）环境中语言特征模式方面的附加方法论价值。本研究结果也可为提高ESP/EBP学习者的语用能力提供重要的教学见解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

English for Specific Purposes LINGUISTICS-

CiteScore

5.70

自引率

8.00%

发文量

审稿时长

62 days

期刊介绍： English For Specific Purposes is an international peer-reviewed journal that welcomes submissions from across the world. Authors are encouraged to submit articles and research/discussion notes on topics relevant to the teaching and learning of discourse for specific communities: academic, occupational, or otherwise specialized. Topics such as the following may be treated from the perspective of English for specific purposes: second language acquisition in specialized contexts, needs assessment, curriculum development and evaluation, materials preparation, discourse analysis, descriptions of specialized varieties of English.