Correspondence Between Citizens and Executive Power: Correlative Text Analysis

Abstract

This article refers to the material of written appeals made by citizens to executive bodies and official responses to the appeals. The authors proceed from the fact that it is possible to objectively assess the quality of written responses to citizens’ appeals only when they are considered together with the initial appeals of the citizens. The authors use an innovative method, applying the linguistic textual approach to the analysis of pairs of business letters. Correlative linguistic textual analysis is demonstrated in the field of two text categories: theme and composition. The article shows the thematic correlation between the response and the original business letter and highlights the most common violations of the categorial thematic correlation (shift of the subject matter of the original letter, incomplete thematic correspondence of the text units in the pair, etc.). The analysis of composition is based on the model composition signs of the letter of appeal and the official reply. Theoretical observations of the linguistic textual character are relevant to the practice of composing official response letters to citizens’ appeals. The use of correlative linguistic text analysis opens an opportunity to objectively evaluate the logical and linguistic quality of the official response letter and develop a methodology for composing response letters on the basis of the source texts.