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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Genre and Genre Analysis
Researches on genre can be traced as far back as to the period of Aristotle, whoconsidered genre as a literary concept in his essay Poetry and later defined it as a term ofthe art of persuasion in his treatise Rhetoric (cited from Fang Yan, 2002). According toSwales (2001), the term genre, which originated in literary and rhetoric, is formallyintroduced by anthropologists into the domain of linguistics for the first time. In recentyears the concept of genre and genre analysis has started to play an important role in thesphere of discourse analysis and has become an important subject matter under discussionin functional linguistics and applied linguistics. The development of researches on genrein the field of linguistics and applied linguistics can be identified in terms of three phases.The first phase focuses on social/communicative purposes of genre and the second one onexamining and analyzing genre structures of texts, with the final one highlighting thestudy of the complexity and diversity of genre (Fang Yan, 2002).
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2.2 An Overview of Lawyer’s Demand Letters
In their daily practice of law, lawyers have to draft letters to a variety of externalaudiences, such as witness, court personnel, and opposing counsel, for many differentpurposes. Except documents submitted to courts and transactional documents, legalcorrespondence is a major form of written communication between law firms and theoutside world. A legal correspondence must be carefully crafted since it matters to therights and interests of the clients of a law firm and represents the image and reputation ofthe firm. If a legal correspondence is ill drafted, it may not produce the intended effectsthat the letter is supposed to have, thus the client may doubt about the competence of thefirm to handle his or her case, and the opposing counsel may conclude that the law firm isincapable of successfully representing its client. Lawyers may draft letters for a variety ofpurposes, but according to Putman (2009), there are three main types of letters thatcontain legal research and analysis to a certain degree, namely, information letters (lettersthat provide information), opinion letters (letters that provide answers or legal opinions)and demand letters, which are widely used as a powerful tool of lawyer’s arsenal.
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Chapter 3 Research Methodology..... 17
3.1 Data Collection ....... 17
3.2 Data Analysis .......... 17
3.3 Research Procedure........... 18
Chapter Four A Genre-based Analysis of English Lawyer’ Demand Letters.......... 20
4.1 Identification of Lawyer’s Demand Letters as a Genre ...... 20
4.2 The Communicative Purposes of Lawyer’s Demand Letters........ 21
4.3 A Sample Analysis of Lawyer’s Demand Letters...... 22
4.4 Move Structures of Lawyer’s Demand Letters in the Corpus ....... 28
4.5 GSP of Lawyer’s Demand Letter .......... 30
4.6 Detailed Explanation of the Move Structures ........... 32
Chapter 5 Functional Linguistic Features of English Lawyer’s Demand Letters ............. 38
5. 1 Interpersonal Mea
