The emergence of a new discourse for business communication, ‘a case study of e-mails in shipping company’

Abstract

E-mail, as an example of electronic medium, has assumed functions which are in some cases associated with spoken language and in other cases associated with formal writing. David Crystal (2001) considers that online language as a new species of interaction, a genuine “third medium”. Business professionals in Algeria have to improve their employees’ English competence in order to be efficient in international trade. In order to prove that e-mail is not only a medium, but a new style of communication as well; 175 business e-mails exchanged between the employees of the shipping company concerned were sampled to identify the rhetorical structure. The analysis based on the corpus reveals features that make up the pattern of business e-mail; it also shows that the electronic channel has an impact on the choice of the language exponents. A wide range of abbreviations represented in letter and number homophones is frequent. Moreover, syntactic reductions are used. The e-mail as a new emerging medium is a new type of discourse. It is a discourse that is developing its own language. In order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, tasks in business communication course should involve students in real business situation to familiarize them with the social features and interactional aspect of the language.