Date of Award

1-1-2000

Thesis Type

Masters

Document Type

Thesis

Divisions

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Department

-

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

Communication by electronic mail has become a dominant mode of communication both within and between organisations in the last few years, many of which have developed their own in-house electronic systems. More and more of our students will enter the workforce to find that their job involves using the electronic mail system for communication; therefore we need insights into the nature of this mode of communication, and ascertain ways in which we can assist our students in acquiring "its particular characteristics, in the same way we teach spoken English, writing and the use of telephones" (Murray, 1988: 4). ln light of the above scenario, this study attempts to investigate the typical or recurrent grammatical features and the functions of electronic mail discourse in a local business community. 1n addition., the study also examines whether the electronic mail system has influenced language forms in the e-mail discourse of the selected business community. Differences between language in the e-mail discourse and language in conventional business writing are also explored in this study. The business community selected is a group of executives in a public limited company in Malaysia The corpus comprises l 02 electronic mail messages from the routine communication of the executives in work contexts. In analysing the data collected, the researcher has adopted the suggestion of Brown and Yule (1983) to describe regularities in the linguistic realizations used by individuals to convey meanings and intentions in a discourse. The identification and description of such "regularities" in the electronic mail messages are based on the ''frequency with which a particular linguistic feature occurs" (Brown & Yule: I 983). Thus, a frequency count of the number and / or percentage of occurrences of features in the messages has been conducted to support the findings. The electronic messages were examined for three aspects - the grammatical features of the messages, their communicative functions and their discourse features . The findings reveal a predominance of main clauses in the imperative mood and declarative mood, and subordinate clauses denoting purpose and reason in the e-mail communication of the particular business community. This seems to reflect that e-mail communication in this community is used more for requesting and informing, and less for enquiring. Other discourse features like opening salutation, opening statement, closing statement and closing salutation are also found in the e-mail messages although they are not compulsory for such a communication. It is hoped that the language features and functions, as well as other discourse features identified in the e-mail communication of the business community would contribute towards pedagogy and course design for English for Business Communication, as well as for e-mail communication at the workplace

Initial

snms

Additional Information

Dissertation (M.A) -- Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, 2000.

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