A Discourse Analysis Approach to Email Communication on Ships

Abstract

Emails have become an inevitable communication tool in a specific profes-sional environment such as a ship. Changes that arose due to data digitaliza-tion, automatization and advances in communication systems have expanded the scope of internal and external ship business correspondence. Neverthe-less, the structure of an email as a genre in seafaring has adapted to generic schemata in online communication and ship-specific communicative stand-ards. Based on the genre analysis theories put forward by Swales and Bhatia, we analyse a corpus of emails collected from five foreign companies (100 pages of text). Then, the collected data were explained and interpreted con-cerning the contextual setting, primarily participants and their role in the giv-en shipboard situation. The findings of this paper have pedagogical implica-tions for creating teaching material for present and future ESP courses and introducing the concept of genre in establishing communication patterns in email correspondence on ships.