The Use of Verbs in Business E-Mail Communication – A Pragmalingu Istic Corpus Study

Corpus analyses conducted with the help of special tools have become more widely used in all areas of linguistics, including discourse analysis, genre analysis and pragmatics. The paper presents a pragmalinguistic research study of verbs, carried out on a specialized corpus of authentic correspondence of (chains of) Slovene business e-mails, Posle-pis. The corpus tools Oxford Wordsmith Tools 5.0 and Sketch Engine were used for analysis, and the research was followed by a comparison of language use with two Slovene reference corpora FidaPLUS and Gigafida. The study confirms the hypothesis that business discourse via e-mail has inherent characteristics that are shown through the frequency of use of certain verbs and verb forms. Certain forms were also identified which prove the conventionalized language use of business e-mail discourse.