A Comparative Genre Analysis of English Business E-mails Written by Iranians and Native English Speakers Saeed Mehrpour Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran Mohaddeseh Mehrzad Shiraz University Language Center, Shiraz, Iran Abstract—The present study aimed at conducting a comparative genre analysis of English business e-mails at generic and lexico-grammatical levels. To this end, a corpus of 60 English business e-mails written by Iranians was compared with a counterpart corpus comprising the same number of emails written by the native English speakers. All of these e-mails served the same communicative purpose (i.e. providing and/or requesting information and actions). They were investigated following Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993) and Santos's (2002) notion of genre analysis. The results revealed that Iranian and native English business correspondents followed closely similar generic structures to exchange information. Moreover, Iranian correspondents favored the lexico-grammatical expressions that helped them respect their interlocutors’ negative face whereas the native English speakers tried to encourage a friendly and intimate atmosphere. Investigating structures and characteristics of English language realized in business settings and for commercial purposes, this study offered a number of implications for business English teaching staff, material developers, and last but not least, business negotiators. Index Terms—genre analysis, business e-mails, lexico-grammatical analysis, politeness I. INTRODUCTION As a type of Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), email is gradually replacing more traditional spoken and written modes, and becoming the dominant medium of communication all over the world. Owing to this growing inclination towards the use of emails, it became increasingly important to uncover the nature of this relatively new medium and the way it fulfills various communicative purposes in different discourse communities. To meet this end, researchers embarked upon the genre analysis of email in different contexts. Genre analysis was first introduced by Swales (1990); as he asserted, the shared communicative purpose is the principal criterion that characterizes a class of communicative events as a genre. Each genre, according to Swales (1990) is composed of certain units called „move‟- "a discoursal and rhetorical unit that performs a coherent communicative function in a written or spoken discourse (Swales, 2004, p. 228).” Bhatia (1993), another pioneer in the realm of genre, believes that genre studies are beneficial to ESP students and teachers as they provide a pre-knowledge of formal and content schemata which would facilitate the learning of both generic conventions and the linguistic resources that help the realization of these conventions. Drawing on Swales (1990) and Bhatia's (1993) notion of genre, several genre studies were conducted to identify the generic features of correspondences (i.e. letters and emails) (Abbasian and Tahririan, 2008; Al-Ali and Sahawneh, 2008; Barron, 2006; Cheung, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009; Flowerdew & Wan, 2006; Ho, 2009; Jalilifar & Beitsayyah, 2011; Santos, 2002; Upton, 2002; Vergaro, 2002, 2004; to cite a few). However, most of these studies have dealt with the analysis of letters and only few have studied the structure of emails. Santos (2002), for example, conducted a genre analysis of business letters; he examined a specific corpus of commercial letters called „Business Letters of Negotiation‟ (LNs) in which all the letters served the purpose of providing and/or requesting information (and/or favors), or in other words, negotiating information. Finally, he extracted a four-move model and the common linguistic choices that were employed in order to realize each identified move. Santos (2002) believed that a large group of people can benefit from his study and get familiar with the linguistic features of such correspondences, since it has investigated a rather general communicative purpose. Cheung (2009) conducted another genre study to compare the discourse structures of Chinese and English direct- marketing sales e-mails and found that the two corpora share similar moves and steps. The results of this study revealed that the writers of sales mails determine the encoding of their messages according to their rhetorical goals, the viewer – maker relationships they wish to establish through the texts, and the social and cultural context within which these texts unfold. In this process the sales genre is likely to adapt in terms of its discourse strategy and textual features. ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 3, No. 12, pp. 2250-2261, December 2013 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.3.12.2250-2261 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER