A discourse analysis of Chinese and English sales letters in Hong Kong

Abstract

This study aims to analyse and compare the discourse structures of Chinese sales letters and English sales letters based on an integrated theoretical framework of social discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1997) and genre analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993). The motivation for conducting this study is two-fold. First, while there exists a multitude of studies that compare the syntax and grammar between Chinese and English, very little contrastive analysis has been carried out at the level of text, especially in the realm of persuasive communication. Second, understanding communication across languages is becoming increasingly important in sales promotion, due to the globalization of business. The corpus of this study consists of 160 Chinese and English sales letters, which were randomly selected from a database of over 10,000 sales letters collected from 36 categories of recipients in Hong Kong over a six-month period. The letters chosen originated from 117 companies in Hong Kong, mainland China, and overseas countries. They represent a variety of author styles. Given the letters are written with similar communicative purpose and social function, similarities are found in their move structures across languages, setting aside grammatical constraints. However, a number of differences are identified, and they include, for example, more frequent reference to social issues and less frequent use of pressure tactics in the Chinese letters. These differences can be attributed to the context of situation and to the reader-writer relationship associated with the different corpora. Results of the analysis were verified by 17 specialist informants in the field of sales promotion communication.