| Company profiles on corporate websites, as a kind of introduction to a company's history, service, products and related information, enable people to have a preliminary understanding of the company. However, little attention has been paid to linguistic research regarding company profile texts. In view of this, the present research examines English company profile texts on corporate websites within the theoretical framework of systemic functional grammar to probe into the interpersonal meaning engrossed in the texts.Based on Halliday's viewpoint of language's interpersonal metafunction, this research gives an analysis of 40 examples of English company profile texts from American and Chinese corporate web pages from both personal and interactive dimensions. The work examines the linguistic patterns in the modality, mood and person systems. It is found that the use of modal expressions in the sample texts reveal that the writers/companies manage to express possible actions and willingness to serve the readers/customers in a polite and negotiable way. Besides, the manipulation of mood structures, especially declaratives in the texts, enables an interaction between the writer and the reader and realizes the writer's main role as information-giver in the speech context in our study. Lastly, the person system, as another grammatical resource in interactive dimension, facilitates the negotiation and sets up a closer relationship between the writer and reader.Through a brief statistical analysis, it is shown that Chinese company profile texts are not the same as their American competitors in terms of the application of modality, mood and persons systems. On the whole, interpersonal meanings are better delivered in American company profile texts. Therefore, Chinese writers need to improve their English in company profile texts so as to be able to communicate better with their readers and realize their objectives from a linguistic perspective.
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