A Contrastive Study On The Gradability Between The English Versions Of Foreign And Domestic Company Introductions

The English version of company introduction plays an important part in promoting and introducing companies'images, products, services, culture to the potential foreign clients for further trading. Hence, this thesis takes the English versions of foreign and domestic company introductions as research objectives to find the similarities and differences between their move structures and to compare those gradable attitudinal resources in domestic company introductions (DCIs) and foreign company introductions (FCIs) on the basis of the move structure analysis. It adopts quantitative and qualitative research method, selects 30 DCIs and 30 FCIs respectively, and does contrastive analysis with the help of the searches software Antconc and the statistical software SPSS 11.5. Theoretically, this study integrates genre analysis with appraisal theory, and further explores the gradability issue of those attitudinal resources in company introductions. Practically, the result of this study can help the domestic company introduction writers better understand the features of English company introduction, write the appropriate English company introduction according to its features, and realize the purpose of promoting the company's products and service.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces the researching backgrounds, the focus of the present study, the data collection and methodology for the corpora, and the organization of this thesis. Chapter two is literature review. The previous studies on company introduction, genre analysis, and promotional genres are reviewed respectively. Chapter three presents theoretical framework. Bhatia's Move Analysis Model and the two appraisal subsystems of Attitude and Graduation of Martin's Appraisal Theory are described, and the analytical framework for this study is established. Chapter four is the main body which first compares the similarities and differences of the move structures in DCIs and FCIs from the macro-level, and then analyzes the gradability situation of those attitudinal resources in Move one and Move two of DCIs and FCIs. The last chapter concludes the findings of this study, and indicates the limitations and suggestions for further research.Through the above discussion and analysis, we come to the following conclusions. Firstly, during the macro-level comparison, DCI and FCI share the same move structure which contains five moves and four strategies. Those are Move one as establishing backgrounds, Move two as introducing products and services, Move three as self-evaluation in which could be adopted two strategies of capability description and achievements presentation, Move four as corporate culture or guidelines, and company prospect, Move five as inviting further communication in which also could be adopted two strategies of offering contact and soliciting cooperation. Secondly, According to the result of move structure comparison, further exploration is focused on the first two moves in DCIs and FCIs. Those attitudinal resources in the first two moves are classified into four types: attitudinal resources of the first type are used to describe the status of the company in Move one; attitudinal resources of the second type are used when the company's products and service are introduced in Move two; attitudinal resources of the third type are used for the situation of presenting some important figures of the company in both moves, and attitudinal resources of the fourth type are used for some other discretional situation. In the micro-level comparison, the gradable attitudinal resources amount of the first type between DCIs and FCIs have no significant difference, and resources amount of the other three types between two corpora have significant difference.