Abstract

This article describes a contrastive study of rhetorical differences between Italian and English ‘For Your Information’ letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information is presented in business correspondence and what rhetorical strategies are used to elicit compliance by a given readership in a given culture. To answer these questions of an essentially pragmatic and ethnolinguistic nature, our research focused on analysing contrastively a corpus of authentic Italian and English business letters. At the macro-textual level, the analysis focused on rhetorical structure, mainly drawing on the notion of move. At the micro-textual level, the analysis concentrated on the pragmatic use of mood, modality, reference system and metadiscourse. This article focuses on the cultural preferences that Italian and English writers show - both at the macro- and micro-textual level - when engaged in ‘For Your Information’ letter writing. It will be shown that in both languages there are differences in the way in which discourse patterns are organized as well as in the use of politeness.