A Chronotopic Analysis of Cover Letters in Persian and English

Abstract The concept of chronotope was originally used by Bakhtin (1981) in literature and literary criticism. But this concept seems to have great potential to be employed in other contexts as well. In English for Specific Purposes (ESP), for example, it can function as a useful tool to better inform L2 writers of the spatial and temporal conventions expected by the L1 genre community. Taking advantage of this capability, the present study used the chronotope in a move-based genre analysis of cover letters in Persian and English. To this end, a corpus of English and Persian cover letters was examined. In this study, the chronotope of each move of a cover letter was determined in the letters of both languages, and then through a contrastive analysis their similarities and differences were discussed. Finally, the important implications of the findings in language instruction were presented.