A Comparison Of Chinese And American Bankers' Statements

As an important communication tool between bankers,shareholders and customers,banker's statement plays a key role in building public relations for banks. This thesis aims to find out similarities and differences between Chinese and American bankers' statements from the perspectives of move structure and attitude lexis and to explore the underlying causes in terms of various cross-cultural factors. For those purposes,a corpus of twenty-four bankers' statements(twelve in Chinese and twelve in English) has been collected to conduct the comparative study.The comparative analysis of move structure is carried out on the basis of Bhatia's (2008) move analysis of chairman's statement.And the study of attitude lexis is performed within the framework of Martin and White's(2005) appraisal theory.Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to gain results of the comparison. Cross-cultural factors such as Hofstede's individualism versus collectivism(1980) and Scollon and Scollon's(2000) politeness system in discourse are discussed to provide insights for cross-cultural study.With the illustration of examples and presentation of statistics,similarities and differences between Chinese and American bankers' statements are identified not only on the macro-level of move structure,but also on the micro-level of attitude lexis.Besides,the cross-cultural causes for those similarities and differences are discussed and interpreted as well.This thesis concludes that cross-cultural factors, such as individualism versus collectivism,politeness system,and time orientation indeed play important roles in professional discourse analysis.They affect the organization of structure and use of lexical words in discourses which are formed in different cultures.The author hopes that the current study will help promote more cross-cultural understanding in the field of financial report discourse.