The Subject Position Of Company In The Configuration Of Genres In The Company Profile

The recent combination of critical social theories and discourse analysis pushes forward the formation of critical approaches to discourse analysis, through which uncovers the dialectic relations of discourse and social life. Discourse is regarded as a reflexive and constitutive element of social life by critical discourse analysts, and thereby discourse analysis enables them to see the implicit social system that subtly shapes the text. It provides a methodology to address the interconnection between discourse and social structure.This study attempts to show how different social structures in which the discourse is embedded contribute to various configurations of texts and how those differences facilitate us to construct the texts appropriately through critical contrasting analysis of company profiles of Chinese and American companies.The analysis of Chinese and American company profiles borrows Fairclough's model for critical discourse analysis to analyze texts from three dimensions: genre, discourse and style. Genre analysis reveals disparities between Chinese and American company profiles that the former has a unified and stable generic structure, while the latter has a diverse and dynamic generic structure. Generic structure preconditions the selection of discoursal resources in the construction of texts and the presentation of the voices or the identities of the text writers at the surface level of the texts. Therefore, the distinctive generic structures of American and Chinese company profiles are realized by particular discourse, which mirrors the identities of American and Chinese companies at the same time. The diverse generic structures of American company profiles elicit much more types of semantic relations, processes and lexical choices at the discoursal level and portray more kinds of identities than those of Chinese company profiles.The differences reflected at the surface level of Chinese and American company profiles are attributed to the subject positions the companies occupy in their particular...