A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Job Advertising Discourses

"Interpersonal meaning" is a phrase that comes from Halliday's systemic functional grammar.It is one of the three main functions of language,which means that people use language to communicate with other people,to establish and maintain relations with other people,to influence the behaviors of other people and to express their own viewpoints on the world.Up to now,there has been a popular trend to study the interpersonal meaning of different types of discourses on the basis of Halliday' s systemic functional grammar.The discourses studied range from political speeches,autobiographies,fundraising and advertisements to court verdicts.Within the field of advertisements,there are researches on public advertisements,dating advertisements,cosmetic advertisements as well as job advertisements.Since the application of computers is becoming more and more popular, an increasing number of job advertisements enter people's view from various websites. This also attracts researchers' interests.They carry out researches on cyber job advertisements.However,most of these studies are only based on English job advertising discourses.Researches on Chinese job advertising discourses are seldom found,not to mention the comparative study of Chinese and English job advertising discourses.This thesis does a comparative analysis of the realization of interpersonal meaning in Chinese and English job advertising discourses.After a critical view of the previous studies on interpersonal meaning,the researcher analyzes the collected samples from three aspects: mood,modality and person system,hoping to find the similarities and differences between Chinese and English job advertisements.The result will help corporations both home and abroad to recruit talents in a wider scope.Meanwhile,it will also help job hunters get a thorough understanding of recruiters' intention and need through their recruiting advertisements,thus get better prepared.In this thesis,20 Chinese job advertisements and 20 English job advertisements are collected respectively from two professional recruiting websites:www.51job.com and www.monster.com.The former is the largest recruiting website in China,and the latter is the most professional recruiting website in America.With the help of WordSmith4.0,a suite of lexical analysis tools,the researcher gets the distribution and frequencies of modal expressions and person pronouns in the samples.According to the statistics,the researcher does detailed analysis of mood,modality and person system in both Chinese and English job advertisements.Based on the analysis,it is found that there are both similarities and differences between Chinese and English job advertisements.In both Chinese and English job advertisements,the speech function of giving information is mainly realized through declarative mood,but it can be also realized by imperative and interrogative mood;the speech function of demanding action is largely realized by imperative mood,but it can be also realized through declarative mood.In English job advertisements,the proper combination of imperative mood,interrogative mood and the "if...," structure can make a sense of dialogue between the recruiter and the applicant,which may shorten the distance between them and facilitate the communication.However,in Chinese job advertisements,the "dialogue" is mainly made through the switch of first person pronouns and second person pronouns.In the aspect of modality,the use of modal auxiliaries in English job advertisements is much more common than that in Chinese job advertisements.According to the research,the similarities are due to the common goal of job advertisements---to give recruiting information,to attract qualified talents and encourage them to take the action of applying the job.The differences partly result from the different features of the two languages and the different cultures of the two people. After all,a thorough understanding of the similarities and differences between Chinese and English job advertisements will help recruiters create more efficient job advertisements and job hunters find a job more easily.Besides,the result will also help to extend the scope of advertising analysis and writing teaching.