The rhetorical moves in written business communication in Korea

Yeonkwon Jung

This present study aims to explicate possible move structures in Korean business correspondence. In particular, I try to explore how the rhetorical moves play a role in doing the face-threatening acts (FTAs hereafter) to save either the writer's or the reader's face.

The primary data consist of authentic business texts of internal (e-mail messages) and external correspondence (formal letters) collected at two different kinds of Korean companies, food and pharmaceutics, from different sectors varying in size and organizational patterns. The corpus of Korean business correspondence provides evidence for five different types of FTAs: disagreements, giving bad news, complaints, compliments, and requests. The total time period during which the texts are written covers the years from 1996 to 2000. From the eclectic perspective of discourse analysis, the theoretical frameworks for the study are genre analysis (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993) and Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness.
 

References

Bhatia, V. 1993. Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman.
Brown, P and S. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis - English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.