Register Variation in Electronic Business Correspondence

Authors

  • Rosa Giménez Moreno University of Valencia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2011/1/137081
Keywords: email, register variation, business English, corpus analysis, electronic correspondence

Abstract

Electronic correspondence is a highly dynamic genre within the business world in which Register Variation (RV) is frequently used as a tool to improve communication but it often can lead to misunderstanding. In order to shed some light on this still unexplored area, the present study firstly offers a practical approach to classify and analyse RV within professional communication. After this, it reviews previous studies on email writing to apply their findings to this approach and, in the third part of the study, a corpus of recent business emails in English is analysed to examine how the key parameters of RV are currently used within this genre. The results will show that, not only the context, but also the roles and intentions of the senders influence an email’s register, often causing internal oscillations between different registers within the same text.

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Author Biography

Rosa Giménez Moreno, University of Valencia

Senior lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology (University of Valencia, UVEG) and member of the University Institute of Applied Modern Languages, IULMA. Since 1992 she has been lecturing in the Faculty of Economics on English for Economics, Business and Finance, English for Tourism, International Legal English and English for Academic Purposes. Her fields of research are related to English for Professional and Academic purposes, with special interest in discourse and corpus analysis and language variation issues. Among her publications, there are titles such as: The boundaries of the concepts of genre, register and style in academic discourse (1997), IT and some aspects of linguistic ambiguity (1998), Tourist's needs versus student's needs: a pedagogical approach to teaching English for Tourism (2001), Protocolos comunicativos en la promoción de servicios turísticos (2005), A new approach to register variation: the missing link (2006), Impartir la clase en ingles (2008), and the book Words for Working: Professional and Academic English for International Business and Economics (2010).
Published
01-06-2011
How to Cite
Giménez Moreno, R. (2011). Register Variation in Electronic Business Correspondence. International Journal of English Studies, 11(1), 15–34. https://doi.org/10.6018/ijes/2011/1/137081
Issue
Vol. 11 No. 1 (2011): New and Further Approaches to ESP Discourse: Genre Study in Focus
Section
Articles

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