This study is a genre analysis which explores the specific discourse community of tax accountants. Tax computation letters from one international accounting firm in Hong Kong were analyzed and compared. To probe deeper into the tax accounting discourse community, a group of tax accountants from the same firm was observed and questioned. The texts…

Examines the relative contributions of subculture membership in writing transactional letters. Letters accompanying articles initially submitted for publication by 26 academic native speakers of English (NSE) and 23 academic nonnative speakers of English (NNSE), and compared them with efforts to write such letters by 21 NSE and 23 NNSE…

Argues that corpus-based text analysis should be going beyond the analysis of lexicogrammatical features to investigate the specific genre features of text. A study of politeness strategies used by Finns, Americans, and Belgians in a learner corpus of letters of application found that Americans tended to be much more patterned--even formulaic--in…

Using the tools of corpus linguistics, genre analysts are now able to easily identify the common linguistic features of the moves and strategies of genres. Such analyses produce large amounts of linguistic data which must be presented to language learners in a meaningful context. One proposed method of doing so is by hyperlinking the data to form…

Reports findings of a survey on genre analysis of 117 commercial letters in English exchanged by fax between a Brazilian company and two European companies. The letters were analyzed in terms of shared communicative purposes and rhetorical features that together contribute to the building-up of the resulting generic structure named "Business…

Proposes that an analysis of academic letters provides insight into the variety of language forms used both formally and informally in academic writing and into the entire process by which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and published. Analyzed a sample of letters to the editor. (Author/VWL)

A study of business letters indicates striking differences in the politeness strategies used by native and nonnative English speakers. Nonnative speakers' language tended to be less formal, more direct, and showed an avoidance of certain politeness strategies. The findings suggest that even grammatically flawless business writing may be perceived…

Distinct regional patterns emerged in a comparison of letters of recommendation from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Both quantitative (linearity, symmetry, data integration, advance organizers, sentence types) and qualitative (content) analyses revealed differences, including organizational patterns and methods of…