A Comparative Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning Between Chinese And English Job Advertisements

One of the most important functions of language is the interpersonal function,which means people use language to interact and set up appropriate relationshipbetween them. Among the three meta-functions of language, studies on ideational andtextual functions are quite common while researches on interpersonal function arerelatively fewer. However, as the most noticeable indicator of the relationship betweenlanguage and society, interpersonal meaning is worthy of profound study.The purpose of the present research is to probe into the interpersonal meaning ofChinese and English job advertisements from the perspective of Halliday’s systemicfunctional grammar and find out how Chinese and English job advertising texts help tointeract and shape appropriate relations between the employer and the potentialemployee.40pieces of recruitment advertisements have been collected from the2011global fortune500corporations to carry out the present research, including20Englishrecruitments from113American corporations and20Chinese ones from61Chinesecorporations in the list of the2011global fortune500.Distributions and frequencies of three linguistic patterns: mood, modality andpronoun systems in Chinese and English job advertising texts have been analyzedrespectively. It is found that from the perspective of systemic functional grammar,although Chinese and English belong to different language families, they share certainsimilarities in the same type of discourse. Results show that they both use such devicesas mood, modality and pronoun system to realize interpersonal meaning of language,but English job advertisements are more active than Chinese ones in each of thesethree aspects.