A Critical Linguistic Approach to a Corpus of Business Letters in Greek

Abstract

Following a multidimensional approach to text variation, the study interprets a corpus of Greek business letters as a composite of clusters of linguistic features, i.e. as factors which represent culture and situation-bound textual dimensions. The study concludes that business letters are produced and interpreted by means of schematic knowledge which establishes categorical and, thus, persuasive language. Persuasive strategies manifested in the data are not developed only on the basis of the factual presentation of information. Probing the notion of cultural relativity, the study reports that participants are also frequently identified in the interactive event and their relationships are foregrounded.