A Study Of Interpersonal Features Of Chairman's Statements-from The Perspective Of Lexical-grammar

Chairman's Statement (CS), as a part of Corporate Annual Report (CAR), describes the company's achievements in the past fiscal year and foresees the future development, assuring the public, no matter the present shareholders or the potential investors, of the competitive advantages of the company and also of their investing rewards. China's entry to WTO and the economic globalization require many mainland companies submit their CARs to the stock exchange committee and the government agencies, and distribute them to shareholders or potential investors. Thus, reviewing or preparing CAR becomes a must for many business people in China. Both professionals at work place and students at school level need to be ready for reading and writing these financial reports in English. CS, as the beginning of CAR, shows its eminent position in this perspective; however, little research has been conducted on this genre both overseas and at home. Therefore, the interpersonal feature analysis of CS is of great significance both to the people involved and to the development of English for Business Purposes (EBP).Based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional grammar (SFG) and Bhatia's genre theory, with the corpus-based methodology, this thesis made a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the interpersonal features of CS from the perspective of lexico-grammar. The research focuses on modality system and personal pronoun system that Halliday has proposed in realizing interpersonal meaning, and appraisal system which is proposed by Martin to develop the interpersonal meaning. A corpus of 30 Chairman's Statements has been set up, and the lexico-grammatical devices have been thoroughly annotated. By means of the Conc 300 tool, the distribution regularity of various lexico-grammatical resources under the three systems has been summarized. The macro-analysis of lexico-grammatical resources in the whole corpus and the comparative analysis of lexico-grammatical resources in different moves both serve to reveal the working mechanism of the devices and how they help to realize the interpersonal meaning of CS.The analysis reveals that CS favors certain lexico-grammatical resources, with modal auxiliary verbs, first person pronoun and appreciation devices enjoying the highest frequency in the three systems respectively; the distribution of various devices vary remarkably from move to move; all the selections of the lexico-grammatical devices from the three systems are an effort to establish a certain relationship with the readers, and they realize the interpersonal meaning of the discourse; The choices of the lexico-grammar are determined by the communicative purposes and the interpersonal functions they are intended to fulfill, and at the same time, they help to fulfill the communicative purposes and interpersonal functions. The two parties are inter-related and interacted.The author hopes this thesis may serve for guiding the ESP practitioners in composing an English native-like CS, enhance the students'awareness of the lexico-grammatical devices in reading and writing, improve their ability to employ those devices, and contribute to the development of China's ESP education.