Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Corporate Emails and the Implication for Business English Teaching

Corporate emails, as a register, have specific linguistic features, which are important for business English learners and can be comprehensively studied under sociolinguistic framework. In order to better teach business English, especially business email writing, a corpus of corporate email corpus was compiled and linguistic features of intra-company email messages extracted and investigated. Statistical data of lexical, grammatical and conventional textual features show that corporate email messages have characteristics of both personal email communication and professional information exchange. The research result also shows that business English includes various sub-registers, which should be widely studied for teaching advanced business English.