Abstract
This article sets out to explore the genre development of sales tongzhi 'circulars' used in mainland China. To do that, an integrated approach based on schema theory and Swales's (1990) genre analysis has been proposed. The strength of this approach lies in its combined perspective which links genre to the social context. To be specific, the concepts of world and formal schemata from schema theory are used to complement Swales's genre analysis. With this approach, the development of sales tongzhi has been explored and a corpus of twenty letters has been analyzed. It was found that the social and economic changes have greatly affected the writing of sales tongzhi. The traditional sales tongzhi have evolved along with the changes brought by the economic opening up in progress since 1978 in China.
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