Introduction
1. Rationale
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Discourse Analysis was greatly influenced by a number of
studies. Halliday emphasized the social functions of language. In Britain, Sinclair and
Coulhard developed a model for the description of Teacher-Pupil talk; other similar works
have dealt with Doctor-Patient interaction, interviews, debates and so on. Meanwhile, in
America, the work of Goffman, Sack and Jefferson is important in the study of
conversation, turn-taking, and other aspects of spoken interactions. Thus, Discourse
Analysis is a rapidly expanding field, providing insights into various aspects of language in
use and therefore of great importance to language teaching. Traditionally, language
teaching has dealt with pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary; but now it is Discourse
Analysis that raises our awareness of how to put this knowledge into action to gain
successful communication.
Business letters in general and letters of enquiry in particular have long been considered as
key documents in the business context due to the fact that Vietnam nowadays is step by
step adhering to the development in the world. Consequently, we have joined a lot of
international organizations and corporations; we also have signed international documents
particularly in the business transactions with other countries. Among those documents and
texts, business correspondence plays a key role. In fact, writing business correspondence is
becoming a more and more important task in many corporations and companies. The letter
of enquiry is indeed significant among various kinds of business letters thanks to its
frequency in use. So many factors have to be taken into consideration in the process of
writing a letter of enquiry; namely the format, the style, the language, so on and so forth.
Additionally, the knowledge of cohesion and coherence is greatly essential in discourse
construction and comprehension for communication. Cohesion and coherence are actually
regarded as the important aspects of language usage.
With all the reasons above, the author would like to choose “An Analysis of Lexical
Cohesive Devices in English Letters of Enquiry” as the topic of this study
2. Aims of the study
The main aims of the thesis are as follows:
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7. Methodology
7.1. The data of the study
The data is taken from 15 English Letters of Enquiry chosen randomly from some foreign
corporations and organizations.
7.2. Methods of the study
To attain the aims of the study, the research shall conduct the following activities:
Firstly, set up a framework of lexical cohesive devices in order to find out the defining
characteristics of Letters of Enquiry as a genre.
Secondly, three previous studies on lexical cohesive devices used in other types of genre
are reviewed to latter compare with the use of lexical cohesive devices in letters of
enquiry.
Thirdly, various letters of enquiry are collected and analyzed in terms of lexical cohesive
devices: reiteration and collocations. All the 15 letters are analyzed to identify the lexical
cohesive devices used, their frequencies of occurrence are counted, and it is through this
process that the significance level of each device to the letters is made clear.
Finally, necessary comments and conclusions are made according to the data analyzed.
The approach to the study is both inductive and deductive, based on a collection of sample
letters of enquiry.
8. Design of the study
Within the scope mentioned above, the study consists of three main parts: introduction,
development, and conclusion
Part B (Development) is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, Literature Review,
theoretical knowledge of cohesive devices and Letters of Enquiry is presented. The second
chapter deals with the literature review of some previous studies on the similar issue. The
third chapter, also the main one of the study, focuses on the analysis of the lexical cohesive
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devices employed in the English letters of enquiry. In the last chapter, we attempt to
present some findings and implications.
Chapter I. Theoretical Background
1.1. Discourse and Discourse Analysis

language has been produced as the result of an act of communication.” Sharing the same
concern, many other linguists have so far given definitions of discourse. Widdowson
(1979) states: “Discourse is a use of sentences to perform acts of communication which
cohere into larger communicative units, ultimately establishing a rhetorical pattern which
characterizes the pieces of language as a whole as a kind of communication.” Whereas
Crystal (1992: 25) says: “Discourse is a continuous stretch of language larger than a
sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke or a
narrative.” Quite differently from the others, Halliday and Hasan (1976) give a simple
definition: “We can define text (discourse) in the simplest way perhaps by saying that it is
language that is functional.”
Linguists have paid much attention to the distinction between a discourse and a text since
confusion of these two terms may result in the failures of discourse analysis. Even though
that the distinction is not always clear and the two terms are used interchangeably by some
linguists. As in the above-mentioned definition of discourse by Halliday and Hasan, “text”
is employed to refer to “discourse”; they see “text” as a “semantic unit” characterized by
cohesion. The two authors state: “A text is a passage of discourse which coherent in these
two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of situation, and therefore consistent
in register; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive” (1976: 23). For
some other linguists, “text” is used for writing and “discourse” for speech. The third group
of linguists like Brown & Yule, Nunan, Widdowson, and Cook see discourse as a process
and text as a product. Brown & Yule argue that text is the representation of discourse and
the verbal record of a communicative act.
In this study, we would like to take Widdowson’s viewpoint of the difference and the
interrelationship between the two as the base: “Discourse is a communicative process by
means of interaction. Its situational outcome is a change in state of affairs: information is
conveyed, intentions made clear, its linguistic product is Text.” (1984: 100)
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1.1.3. Discourse Context
1.1.3.1. Context
David Nunan (1993: 7) defines: “Context refers to the situation giving use to the discourse,

Field: In the view of Halliday and Hasan (1976: 22), the field of discourse is “the total
event, in which the text is functioning, together with the purposive activity of speaker or
writer.” Therefore, they argue that field includes the subject-matter as one element in it.
Field is also considered to refer to what is happening, to the nature of the social action that
is taking place. Hatim and Mason share the same idea in that field is different from subject
matter because one field maybe characterized by a variety of subject matters.
Mode: The mode of discourse refers to the medium of the language activity including
channel. Channel is an important aspect of mode. Hatim and Mason (1990) show their
view of mode as follows: “The mode of discourse refers to what part the language is
playing, what is that the participants are expecting the language to do for them in that
situation, the symbolic organization of the text, the status that it has, and its function in the
context, including the channel (is it spoken or written or some combination of the two?)
and also rhetorical mode, what is being achieved by the text in terms of such categories as
persuasive, expository, didactic, and the like.”
Tenor: As for Halliday and Hasan, “the tenor refers to the type of role interaction, the set
of relevant social relations, permanent and temporary, among the participants involved.” It
is the tenor that relays the relationship between the addresser and the addressee. In more
detailed, the tenor of discourse is considered to refer to who is taking part, their statuses
and roles. This also points out what kinds of role relationship got among the participants.
In summary, field, mode, and tenor of discourse are in a dialectical relationship. Hatim and
Mason (1990: 51) affirm this: “These three variables are independent: a given level of
formality (tenor) influences and is influenced by a particular level of technicality (field) in
an appropriate channel of communication (mode).”
1.1.3.3. Genre
Discourse is frequently studied from the perspective of register (level of formality) or
genre (communicative purpose, audience, and conventionalized style and format). A genre
is a culturally and linguistically distinct form of discourse such as narrative, exposition,
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procedural discourse, etc. In recent years, genre has been a controversial topic for a large
number of linguists who form the two main trends.

product of a communicative process. Therefore, disciplines of discourse analysis must be
followed carefully.
1.2. Cohesion
1.2.1. The Concept of Cohesion
The concept of cohesion is closely connected with text. It is defined as the grammatical
and lexical relationship between different elements of a text. According to Yule (1996), a
text is usually considered to have a certain structure which depends on factors quite
different from those required in the structure of a single sentence. Some among those
factors are described in terms of cohesion, or the ties and connections which exist within a
text.
Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) also define cohesion in a similar way: “The concept of
cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and
that define it as a text.” They also point out that cohesion often occurs where the
interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another.
To summarize, cohesion refers to the linguistic elements that make a discourse
semantically coherent; or as Hoa (2000: 23) indicated “cohesion refers to the formal
relationship that causes texts to cohere or stick together”.
1.2.2. Cohesion vs. Coherence
The distinction between cohesion and coherence has not always been clarified partly
because both terms come from the same verb cohere which means sticking together. In
fact, cohesion is the network of different kinds of formal relations that provide links
between or among various parts of a text, and is expressed partly through the grammar and
partly through the vocabulary. Coherence, on the other hand, is understood as the quality
of being meaningful and unified. As for Nunan (1993), coherence is “the feeling that
sequences of sentences or utterances seem to hang together”. Coherence refers to the type
of semantic and rhetorical relationship that underlines texts.
If cohesion refers to the linguistic elements that make a discourse semantically coherent,
then coherence involves with what makes a text semantically meaningful.
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Cohesion is the realization of coherence, and coherence is something created by the

Semantic connection
Reference; lexical reiteration
Conjunction
Table 1.1 : Type of Cohesion
(Source: Haliday and Hasan, 1976:304)
Reference, substitution and ellipsis are clearly grammatical; lexical cohesion, as the name
implies, lexical. Conjunction is on the borderline of the grammatical and the lexical; the set
of conjunctive element can probably be interpreted grammatically in terms of systems, and
some conjunctive expressions involve lexical selection. However, it is better to put it in the
group of grammatical cohesion as it is mainly grammatical with a lexical component
inside. Consequently, we can refer to grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion as
follows:
Grammatical cohesion Lexical cohesion
Reference
• Exophoric
• Endophoric
- personal
- demonstrative
- comparative
Substitution
• Norminal substitution
• Verbal substitution
• Clausal substitution
Ellipsis
• Norminal ellipsis
• Verbal ellipsis
Conjunction
• Additive
• Adversative
• Causal

substitution: norminal, verbal, and clausal substitution.
Ellipsis
Ellipsis is an omission of certain elements from a sentence or a clause and can only be
recovered by referring to an element in the proceeding text. The former is non-cohesive,
and the latter is cohesive. Elliptical cohesion always appears anaphoric. Ellipsis can be
repetition. This is quite similar to substitution in terms of three types: norminal ellipsis,
verbal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis.
Conjunction
Conjunction differs from substitution, ellipsis and reference in the fact that it is not a
device for reminding the readers of previously-mentioned entities, actions, and states of
affairs. It is not in the kind of anaphoric relation. It is, however, a truly cohesive device
because it signals relationship that can only be understood through reference to other parts
of the text. There are four types of conjunction: temporal, causal, additive and adversative.
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1.2.4.2. Lexical Cohesion
Lexical cohesion was first advanced in terms of collocation by Firth (1957) and later
developed by Halliday (1961, 1966). Lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a
discourse are semantically related in some way. Halliday and Hasan (1976) classify lexical
cohesion into two main categories: reiteration and collocation.
Reiteration
Reiteration, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976: 318) is “the repetition of a lexical
item, or the occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the context of reference; that is,
where the two occurrences have the same referent.” Reiteration involves repetition,
synonyms and near synonyms, superordinates, and general words.
Collocation
Collocation is known as the tendency to co-occur in the same lexical environment without
depending on any semantic relationship.
Within the scope of this minor thesis, we would like to focus on the analysis of only lexical
cohesive devices used in English enquiry letters.
1.3. The Letter of Enquiry in English and its properties

• Written channels may enable the sender to convey his/her message more
effectively. Writers can present their ideas in the most efficient way, even in
difficult situations.
• Written channels are less expensive than oral ones for reaching large group of
people or transmitting information over long distances.
Among written means of correspondence, business letters nowadays seem not as
convenient as some other electronic ones like e-mails, telexes, faxes, cables, which can be
transmitted in just a few seconds. Letters; however, may be the best means of
communication in many cases – when the corresponding context is highly formal or when
an important, reliable document with signs and stamps is needed.
1.3.2. General Description of Letters of Enquiries
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1.3.2.1. What is a Letter of Enquiry?
Actually, the letter of enquiry can be referred to as request letter or inquiry letter or letter
of inquiry. Among various kinds of business letters, letters of enquiry seems to occupy a
considerable proportion. As the name states, a letter or enquiry is one type of business
letters which is written to enquire something. The letter of enquiry is useful when you need
information, advice, names, or directions. There are two types of inquiry letters: solicited
and unsolicited.
You write a solicited letter of inquiry when a business or agency advertises its products or
services. For example, if a software manufacturer advertises some new package it has
developed and you can't inspect it locally, write a solicited letter to that manufacturer
asking specific questions. If you cannot find any information on a technical subject, an
inquiry letter to a company involved in that subject may put you on the right track. In fact,
that company may supply much more help than you had expected (provided of course that
you write a good inquiry letter).
The letter of inquiry is unsolicited if the recipient has done nothing to prompt your inquiry.
For example, if you read an article by an expert, you may have further questions or want
more information. You seek help from these people in a slightly different form of inquiry
letter. As the steps and guidelines for both types of inquiry letters show, you must

between writers and readers because we are working on written discourse.
Mode: The mode of letters of enquiry is in the form of formal written discourse.
Under “Mode”, we would like to discuss the following parts:
a. Length of discourse
In this study, we would like to concentrate on “neutral” letters of enquiry, i.e. not too short
and not too rhetorical. The right length includes the right amount of information. If senders
leave out vital information, they may loose the opportunity to be answered and acted on
their enquiries.
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Totally, enquiry letters are rather short and simple, mostly presented in only one page. If
we take sentence unit to measure the length of discourse of this kind of business letters,
then they have the average length of only around 4 sentences.
Among 15 selected letters for this study, the shortest one consists of 3 sentences and the
longest is of 5 sentences.
b. Kinds of sentences
The study of letters of enquiry shows that the common trend is to use compound and
complex sentences. A paragraph often consists of one or two sentences so it conveys a lot
in a sentence. The following is a typical starting paragraph of enquiry letters which tells
the reader what sort of firm the writer is from and how the reader’s firm is known.
We are a large record store in the center of Poitiers and we are indebted for your
address to the Trade Delegation of Japan in Hanoi. [Enquiry Letter (EL) 2]
Our analysis of 61 sentences taken from surveyed letters of enquiry shows that simple
sentences account for approximately only 23% (14/61 sentences) while the rate of 77% is
for compound and complex sentences (47/61 sentences). In addition, most of simple
sentences are the ones that come in the last paragraph to create a constructive look for the
letter. Below are some examples.
We look forward to hearing from you soon [EL 2]
We thank you in advance for your trouble. [EL 8]
c. Length of sentences
Many linguists’ surveys show that the easiness and difficulty in reading a text is related to

Mood: Through working on 15 chosen letters, it is realized that imperative sentences are
used seldom in comparison with the declarative ones, which are the main occurrences in
letters of enquiry. The imperatives can be counted for totally only 5 times (in EL 3, 4, 9,
15, 11) and are often related to the inquiry or request. For instance:
Please quote your latest price and state the time of delivery and the most favourable
terms of payment,… [EL 4]
When quoting, kindly send us a range of samples of the goods. [EL 9]
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Voice: Style of letters of enquiry should not be so simple that it becomes discourteous. It is
normally suggested that the passive voice should be one of stylistic devices for formal
style documents. However, the study among selected letters shows completely contrary
results. The body part of most letters is often written in active voice with the repeated use
of subject “we”.
The passive is rarely used as we could realize only 4 cases (in EL 3, 5, 14, 15) during the
study of letters for the paper. Following are some instances.
The work would have to be completed before the end of February and you would be
required to sign a contract to that effect. [EL 3]
Your name and address have been given to us by the Japan-Vietnam Trade
Association. [EL 5]
Delivery would be required within three months of the order. [EL 14]
The prices are preferred to be CIF London including packing. [EL 15]
Chapter II. Literature Review
Thanks to the open-door policy renovation process, Vietnam is now expanding its
relationship with the other nations in economic, scientific and technical field. English has
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been widely used in almost every field, particularly in business. As a popular means of
communication, English is considered a key to success in international business ventures.
Regarding a variety of tasks facing the Vietnamese in business area, we cannot help
mentioning business letters writing. Business letters are becoming more and more popular
in the country today. Therefore, the question “how to write effective business letters” has

addition, it is undeniable that the other lexical cohesive devices also play an indispensable
role in the creation of cohesion and cohesion in sales letter writing.
The second study is also an M.A. thesis written by Le Thi Mai Hien which is “An Analysis
of Cohesive Devices in English Application Letter” (2004). The process of researching on
twenty English application letters has enables her to reach the following results.
Table 2.2. The frequency of occurrence of reiteration in English application letters
Types of reiteration Frequency of occurrence (%)
Repetition 53.4
Synonyms 10.4
Near-synonyms 11.3
Superordinate 24.9
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Graph 2.2. Frequency of occurrence of lexical cohesive devices in English application
letters
Repetition in English application letter also occupies the first position among the four
kinds of reiteration with up to 53.4%. Differently from English sales letters, superordiates
rank the second with a considerably higher percentage, 24.9% compared with 11%.
Synonyms and Near-synonyms account for nearly the same portion, which is respectively
10.4% and 11.3%. However, unlike in sales letters, near-synonyms in application letters
seem to play a more important part, with 11.3% compared with 4.9%.
The next study we would like to review is another M.A. thesis by Phuong To Tam (2003)
“An analysis of Coherence and Cohesion and a Contrastive Analysis of Lexical Cohesive
Devices in English and Vietnamese”.
Unlike the two other mentioned papers, the data for this study is not from business
correspondence but from a chapter (chapter 5) on International Trade in the textbook
“International Business – An Integrated Approach” by John J. Wild, Kenneth L. Wild, and
Jerry C. Y. Han (1998). The attention of the study is paid to considering contrastive
analysis of lexical cohesive devices (including reiteration and collocation) in English
(source language) in the original textbook and their equivalents in Vietnamese (target
language) in the translation version. The author attempts to collect data in both English

Types of synonyms Frequency of occurrence (%)
Nouns 23
Verbs 29
Adjectives 48
Graph 2.5. Antonyms – Frequencies of Occurrence
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Table 2.5 reveals the frequencies of occurrence of antonyms of different parts of speech. It
is clearly seen that unlike synonyms, antonyms happen mostly with adjectives, of 48%,
next comes to the verbs of nearly 30% and the least in nouns.
The paper by Phuong To Tam then focus on different types of collocations in English in
which she classified collocations (in terms of structure) into two main types: Noun-
collocations with noun as one element and the others without the appearance of nouns.
Table 2.6. Percentage of Noun-collocations and other types
Types of collocations Frequency of occurrence (%)
Noun-collocations 75
Others 25
Graph 2.6. Percentage of Noun-collocations and other types
As can be seen from the graph, noun-collocations dominate all other types of collocations
with up to three quarters of the whole pool. The other types occupy for only 25% of all the
cases.
In summary, it is noticeable that many researches on cohesive devices and particularly
lexical cohesive devices have been carried out in many discourses and genres. However,
none has been done to English letters of enquiry. Thanks to the results gained from these
studies, we can see more clearly the distinction in the use of lexical cohesive devices in
letters of enquiry and in other kinds of texts.
Chapter III. Lexical Cohesive Devices in
English Letters of Enquiries
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