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English business letter’s quality which is one of the important factors that decides the success or failure of a business deal. Owing to the important role of lexical chunks in language acquisition and the practical value of English business letter, it is essential to study the characteristics of the use of lexical chunks in English business letter. For English foreign language learners the author hopes they should pay more attention to lexical chunks and make them fully use. For English foreign language teachers, the author hopes that this study may provide them the use of lexical chunks in learners’ business English letters and then facilitate their teaching in business English letters.
This thesis aims to investigate the characteristics of the use of lexical chunks in business English letters on the basis of Hattingen’s and Decarrico’s four types of categorizations which consists of five parts. The first part provides an introduction to the writing of this thesis which includes the research background, purpose and significance, and research questions of this study. The second part is a general literature review of the related theories of lexical chunks that involves the definition, classification and main thoughts of the theory of lexical chunks. The third part presents the research methodology. The fourth part is about the analysis and results. The last part comes to the conclusion, this part includes the pedagogical implications of the study and suggestions for future study.
II. Literature Review
2.1 A Brief Introduction of Lexical Chunks
2.1.1 Research History of Lexical Chunks
Over the past 40 years, represented by Chomsky, most of the generative linguists, have been working on the creativity of language as priority of the research. As a result, the major concern of the linguists becomes syntax. Meanwhile, another aspect of language which is prefabricated language, lexical chunk has not been given enough attention. Generative linguists’ emphasis on the creativity of language covers a basic fact that much of the language people use everyday is not unique or unprecedented. Chomsky defines vocabulary as a disorderly list of all” lexical formatives” (Chomsky 453).On the contrary, grammar, according to Chomsky, is a kind of mechanism that is only used to generate sentences that conform to grammatical rules (Chomsky 131). Therefore, it is the grammar that is of creativity, while vocabulary is just the appendage to it.
Another research tradition in modern linguistics has always very important to the vocabulary in language unlike Chomsky and his followers which is J. R. Firth the founder of the London School. He emphasizes the regularity of context and the predictability of speech all the time. He put forward the conception “collocation” actually makes a breakthrough in the traditional issues like word’s formation, metaphor, and semantics and so on. After Firth, other linguists, such as Halliday, Mitchell, Sinclair has been researched broadly on collocation. With the further development of psycholinguistics and the theory of construction grammar, linguists put forward the conception of lexical chunks which embody the relationship among meaning, structure and language in use. They are able to promote the development and perfection of grammatical rules. They are able to help learners use accurate and native-like language and make the burden of output less on them.
2.1.2 Definition of Lexical Chunks
English Business letter is a business letter used in business transactions to promote international trade relationship and to transform as a form of essential communication and written document. English business correspondence takes various forms in the business activities, such as business e-mails and business faxes. They serve the purposes of inquiring information, offering, giving a reply, negotiating, proposing, claiming and adjusting, ordering goods, selling products, and also building good will, etc." As a piece of conversation by post” (Gann 179).English business letter is indispensable to business communication. According to Hattingen and DeCarrico, lexical chunks are lexical phrases in languages with length loaded with pragmatic function. “ They are multiword lexical phenomena that exist somewhere between the traditional poles of lexicon and syntax, conventionalized form/function composites that occur more frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning than language that is put together each time. These phrases include short, relatively fixed phrases such as long ago, or longer phrases or clauses such as if I X, then I Y, the ___ er X, the ___ er Y, each with a fixed, basic frame, with slots for various fillers (a day ago, a week ago, the bigger X, the smaller Y, the older you are, the wiser you are).Each is associated with a particular discourse function, such as expressing time, a day___ ago, or relationships among ideas, the bigger X, the smaller Y. ”