Business communication across three European cultures: A contrastive analysis of British, Spanish and Polish email writing

Abstract

Today the most international written mode of communication within the\nbusiness world is electronic correspondence. As the introductory section\nexplains, diverse analyses of emails written in different cultures have been\ncarried out revealing interesting differences and similarities in their discourse\nfeatures and rhetorical strategies. However, a comparative examination of\nbusiness emails from representative European cultures such as British (Northern\nEurope), Spanish (Southern Europe) and Polish (Eastern Europe) has not been\nundertaken so far. With this aim, a corpus of over 100 emails of response to\nbusiness requests written in English by companies set up in these three cultures\nhas been compiled and analysed. The main research targets are to observe the\nmain parameters of variation across these cultures, the existent variation\nregarding the prototypical move structure and how register variation fluctuates\ndepending on each culture. The results will indicate that across these cultures the\nmove structure of this genre is more complex than current templates and\nexisting published materials show. The study also demonstrates that, while there\nis a tendency to standardize email correspondence at a European level, there are\ncertain parameters of variation that may help language learners and users to\nconform their messages depending on the recipient�s culture.