A Contrastive Analysis of Metadiscourse Features in Business e-mails Written by Non-native Speakers of English

Abstract

Metadiscourse is usually studied in terms of a cross-cultural exploration of interpersonality, mainly in academic English, but we believe that this approach could be applied to other genres. The main purpose of this study is to compare some metadiscourse features used in digital business communications. More specifically, we focus on the interactional metadiscourse devices categorised as boosters. We analysed and compared a corpus of one hundred emails written by two groups of non-native speakers of English working in an export company and using English to communicate in a business environment. One group was composed of workers from Spain and the other was composed of workers from China. Our aim was to analyse the differences in the use of boosters and the causes of variation in their use, which may be related to the need to employ assertiveness or politeness in business contexts.

An Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in International Postgraduate Business Students’ Texts

“…Text-based studies of metadiscourse in business texts have been confined to academic research articles (Cao & Hu, 2014;Dueñas, 2007Dueñas, , 2010Hyland, 2005c;Hyland & Tse, 2005a, 2005bKhedri, Heng, & Ebrahimi, 2013;Murillo, 2012;Pooresfahani, Khajavy, & Vahidnia, 2012;Sultan, 2011), master's theses and dissertations (Hyland, 2004;Samraj, 2008), and workplace contexts (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2009;Camiciottoli, 2010Camiciottoli, , 2011Carrió-Pastor & Calderón, 2015;Hyland, 1998a). Cao and Hu (2014) compared the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in 120 quantitative and qualitative research articles across three social science subfields: applied linguistics, education, and psychology.…”

“…The findings showed that the executives strongly focused on trustworthiness and commitment to moving forward by employing a variety of ethics-related terms. Carrió-Pastor and Calderón (2015) compared the use of boosters in a corpus of 100 emails written in English by Spanish and Chinese groups working in an export company. The findings showed that although some boosters (know, confirm) were used more frequently by the two groups, there was a cultural variation in the use of these devices: Spanish writers of English showed a preference for greater assertiveness (must) when communicating in business English.…”

Cross-Cultural Analysis of English Modal Constructions in Engineering Papers

“…This phenomenon can be seen, for example, in the utilisation of certain expressions which are not found in 'standard English', in the different ways in which certain words are used, and in variations in language patterns. This aspect has been pointed out by several researchers, such as Yli-Jokipii and Jorgensen (2006), Carrió-Pastor (2009, 2014, 2019a, 2019b, Schleef (2009), Carrió-Pastor and Muñiz (2012, Candel and Carrió-Pastor (2013) and Carrió-Pastor and Candel (2013).…”

Análisis comparativo de los marcadores de compromiso en los comentarios sobre noticias digitales en España y Chile

“…Dada la importancia de los lectores/interlocutores en este tipo de comunicación, creemos que es importante analizar los marcadores de compromiso que se utilizan para marcar el territorio del escritor y llamar la atención del lector. En líneas generales, los estudios sobre el metadiscurso se han centrado, principalmente, en el análisis del discurso académico (Hyland y Tse, 2004;Hyland, 2005a;Mur-Dueñas, 2011;Li y Wharton, 2012;Alonso Almeida y Carrió-Pastor, 2015;Carrió-Pastor, 2016), aunque algunos investigadores también los han utilizado para estudiar otros géneros discursivos (Carrió- Pastor y Muñiz Calderón, 2013, 2015a, 2015bGonzález Arias, 2014). En este artículo hemos decidido centrarnos en el estudio de los marcadores de compromiso, ya que este tipo de estrategias son vitales para lograr que se lean los comentarios a noticias y se repliquen.…”