A Comparative Study Of Stance On English Corporate Official Website Between Chinese And American Enterprises

As an important media of external publicity and communication,corporate official website plays an important role in establishing corporate image,spreading corporate culture and enhancing corporate reputation,so it has attracted more and more attention from academic circles at home and abroad.As an important part of corporate official website,About Us directly answer the question "Who am I?" Its language expression has an impact on the image,reputation,influence and competitiveness of the enterprise itself,thus affecting its ability to obtain resources.One of the most important things to use language is to indicate the stance,which can affect the communication between the enterprise and the target audience.Proper stance expression can help enterprises gain audience’s trust,achieve good communication with stakeholders and gain social recognition.However,due to the influence of domestic culture and context,it is often difficult for Chinese enterprises to achieve the expected publicity and communication when they promote and introduce themselves to the overseas markets.Therefore,the About Us section from 30 Chinese and 30 US companies’official website are collected as two small corpora.Based on the Stance Markers Theory,this study makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences of the stance expressions of Chinese and American enterprises in About Us,and explores the reasons for the differences in stance expressions from the cultural perspective in combination with the Cultural Dimensions Theory,so as to provide suggestions for Chinese enterprises to choose appropriate stance expression strategies.The results show that:Influenced by five cultural dimensions including power distance,uncertainty avoidance,individualism or collectivism,long-term orientation or short-term orientation and indulgence or restraint,Chinese enterprises prefer to use hedges for accuracy,fact-asserting boosters,self-referential markers and attitude markers that express success and collectivism meanings,and try to avoid using attitude markers to comment uncertainties while American enterprises are more willing to use hedges for reliability,certainty-indicating boosters,first-person markers,and especially prefer to use all kinds of attitude markers to show their feelings,judgements and emotions towards certain topics.This study provide reference for Chinese enterprises to build English website and express stance properly in corporate official website in the cross-cultural situation,which is helpful for enterprises to achieve better publicity purpose when facing overseas audience.