A Genre Analysis Of Job Advertisements In Chinese Newspapers

Most of the studies of advertisements rest on the surface-level description of language features, and they seldom touch upon job advertisements which have become an important and frequent communicative activity, so job advertisements are worthy of being studied from the new perspective of genre analysis, which will provide us more satisfactory 'thick' description and explanation, and help us know well how a text is organized and why it is organized as it is.Within the theoretical framework of genre analysis, this thesis attempts to investigate job advertisements as a branch of promotional genre thoroughly, which includes analyzing and rationalizing their move structures and generic structure potential, the differences of the generic structure potentials of job advertisements across time and the differences of the generic structure potential between Chinese job advertisements and American ones. By doing so, it will not only provide a full view of job advertisements but also illustrate how people realize their communicative purposes with language and why they write in the way they do.At first, the thesis surveys the communicative purposes of job advertisements. Then based on the framework of Swalesian school, it comes up with the move structure manipulated by expert writers: in order to fulfill the communicative purposes, a job advertisement will contain the moves, such as 'establishing credential', 'introducing position', 'qualifying candidature', 'specifying position', 'offering incentive', 'soliciting response', 'urging response' and 'reminding'.Then based on Hasan's theory of generic structure potential, the generic structure potential of job advertisements is educed as follows: the move 'establishing credential' is optional, if it occurs, it must precede the elements to its right; the moves 'introducing position' and 'qualifying candidature' are obligatory, and the moves 'specifying position' and 'offering incentive' are optional; if 'specifying position' occurs, it may precede or follow 'qualifying candidature'; neither 'specifying position' nor 'qualifying candidature' can go before 'introducing position'; if 'offering incentive' occurs, it can occur anywhere as long as it does not precede 'establishing credential' and it does not follow the moves to its right; 'introducing position','specifying position', 'qualifying candidature' and 'offering incentive' can also recur equally or unequally, but their recurrences follow the same sequence rules; the move 'soliciting response' is obligatory; the moves 'urging response' and 'reminding' are optional, if they both occur, 'reminding' may precede or follow 'urging response', and both of them can precede, follow or be inserted in 'soliciting response'.Then after figuring out the generic structure potential of American job advertisements, a cross-cultural statistic comparison is made to demonstrate that: American and Chinese job advertisements show different preferences regarding rhetorical structure, occurrence frequency and linguistic realization, which shows that job advertisements as a genre is socio-culturally dependent communication event, and socio-cultural factors play a role in shaping genre.Likewise, a diachronic statistic comparison of job advertisements is carried out to show that: job advertisements in different times show different tendencies regarding rhetorical structure, occurrence frequency and reoccurrence realization, which demonstrates that job advertisements as a genre is changing and evolving along with the development of the society.