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is a typical act of directives that is defined as the speaker’s attempts to get thehearer to do something that the hearer was able to do. Brown and Levinson (1978)defined request as a kind of face-threatening act since it has the feature of imposition,speakers need to be polite enough to save hearers’ face. Bach & Harnish’s (1979:48)defined requests as a speech act expressing the speaker’s intention (or, if it is clearthat he doesn’t expect compliance, his desire or wish) that the hearer takes thisexpressed desire as the reason (or part of his reason) to act. Besides, Blum-Kulka et al(1989) considered request as a pre-event act where hearer was expected to fulfill the speaker’s want in the future. And according to Trosborg (1995), “a request is anillocutionary act whereby a speaker (requester) conveys to a hearer (requestee) thathe/she wants the requestee to perform an act which is for the benefit of the speaker.”In his opinion, the ultimate purpose of a request is to fulfill the requester’s benefits,which could be a favor or service, such as asking a requestee for something or toperform a certain act, and could also be verbal, such as requiring for some information.However, in the business field, requests could benefit both sides. They could learnsome relevant business information by requests, which would facilitate theachievement of trade goals. Request in business communication is defined as “alegitimate attempt by the writer to get the reader to perform an action required by thebusiness circumstances through evoking the reader’s need for compliance on thegrounds of corporate and personal motivators such as necessity, duty and goodwill”(Chiappini & Harris, 1996) To be more concise and accurate, request in this study isdefined as a directive act attempt by a speaker to get the hearer to perform an act orprovide some information motivated by corporate factors.

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2.2 Previous studies of workplace English emails

The current research on email is more on the analysis of the genre. Email is a veryspecial form of communication, which is neither formal as written discourse norinformal as spoken discourse. And it has similar characteristics as both written andoral discourse at the same time. Paul (2012) analyzed emails from the perspectives ofboth interdiscursivity and meta-discursivity and found that its genre has a hybridnature. Emails had the characteristics of both oral and written genres from these twoaspects. In order to know that whether the spoken nature of email message hadalready started to affect business written communication, Julio (2000) made acomparison with some business emails and business letters, which suggest thatelectronically mediated communication is already affecting business written communication, showing a tendency towards a more flexible register. Li (2007)pointed out that the communicative function of business English email determines theparticularity of its genres which had features similar to email and business Englishletters. At the same time, it also absorbed the characteristics of oral discourse and ofwritten discourse, it was an organic combination of these four. Ji (2001) proposed thatbusiness emails were largely characterized by colloquialism, personalization,effectiveness, spontaneity, arbitrariness, and flexibility. Even though it had not formeda new communicative genre yet and can only be named as “Ne-genre”, 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。