An Appraisal Analysis Of The English Company Profile Discourse

Company profiles offer the basic company information to the readers so as to project a favorable corporate image, persuade them to buy products and services or to cooperate. However, company profiles have not drawn the due attention of the linguistic field and the domestic researchers focus their study on company profiles from the perspectives of translation, genre, interpersonal meaning and so on. Up to now, very little study has applied the Appraisal Theory into the analysis of the company profile discourse.In order to find out how the company profile discourse realizes interpersonal meaning by using the appraisal resources, the study selects the English company profiles on the websites of 50 companies on the Forbes 2009 Global 500 list,and then it makes a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis on the selected materials within the framework of the Appraisal Theory with the assistance of the Corpus Tool UAM 2.364. The three research questions like what attitudes are advanced, how they are advanced and amplified in the company profile discourse will be answered respectively within the three categories of the Appraisal System, namely, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The research results are as follows:First, in the Attitude System, Judgment resources are used most frequently. Various attitudinal resources are used to construct the attitudinal position and manipulation with the putative readers. Concretely speaking, Affect, Judgment and Appreciation resources are used to achieve shared emotional, ethical and aesthetical position so as to establish rapport between the writers and the readers. The attitudinal resources are dominated by the Inscribed and Positive ones.Second, in the Engagement System, the Dialogistic Expansion outweighs the Dialogistic Contraction, which indicates the profile writers negotiate dialogically with other voices: to show their respect to the readers, their tolerance towards alternative voices and their goodwill to interact with the readers. The neutral Acknowledgement resources have the prominent occurrence in the Engagement System.Third, in the Graduation System, Number resources which show the performances of the companies are used extensively;the frequent use of up-scaling Graduation aims at impressing the readers and highlighting the advantages and merits of the companies.In brief, the current research reveals that company profiles contain abundant Appraisal resources, which interweave and serve for the purpose of promotion and persuasion. The significance of the present research lies in: it examines the applicability of the Appraisal theory and it will shed the light on the writing and understanding of the company profiles.