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The intertextual nature of embedded email communication for contract negotiation activities

  • Anthony Townley

    Anthony Townley received his PhD in Linguistics from Macquarie University and is currently Associate Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce & Business. His special teaching areas include English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Legal and Business Writing. He is currently undertaking sociolinguistic research of legal/business discourse practices in Japan.

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Published/Copyright: February 1, 2021

Abstract

Emails have become the institutionalised communication medium for many discourse activities in work contexts. Sociolinguistic research in this area has mainly focused on the textual and communicative conventions of emails, as defined by disciplinary cultures and practices. This study is the first to analyse the intertextual nature of email communication for commercial contract negotiation purposes, with a particular focus on the communicative function of embedded emails. This concept relates to a genre of email discourse, which embeds the meaning of a series of messages generated by different participants in response to the original email, hence the name ‘embedded emails’. This study uses discourse and genre analysis to examine how a geographically dispersed team of legal and business professionals in Europe exploited the dialogic nature of embedded emails to negotiate amendments to contracts pertaining to an international Merger & Acquisition (M&A) transaction in English. The findings of this study show that embedded emails facilitate transparent collaboration between the individual professionals, by enabling them to monitor the exchange of proposals and counter-proposals during the negotiation process. This documented ability to trace and participate in contract negotiation activities through intertextual chains of embedded email communication is a key feature of professional communicative competence.


Corresponding author: Anthony Townley, International Studies, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, 4-4 Sagamine, 470-0193, Nisshin, Aichi, Japan, E-mail:

About the author

Anthony Townley

Anthony Townley received his PhD in Linguistics from Macquarie University and is currently Associate Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce & Business. His special teaching areas include English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Legal and Business Writing. He is currently undertaking sociolinguistic research of legal/business discourse practices in Japan.

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Received: 2019-09-12
Accepted: 2021-01-13
Published Online: 2021-02-01
Published in Print: 2021-07-27

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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