Intercultural Interpretations Of Appraisal Meanings In English And Chinese Recruitment Advertisements

Appraisal theory, also known as Appraisal system, which is regarded as thesupplementary research on interpersonal meanings within Systemic FunctionalLinguistics, draws on semantic resources to illustrate and interpret appraisal meaningsof the writer/speaker, by means of its three subsets—Attitude, Engagement andGraduation. And during last several decades, appraisal meaning studies on differentgenres have been increasingly prevalent by dint of Appraisal system’s important rolein the discourse analysis. However, most linguists mainly seek out the evaluativelanguage within English discourses and Chinese ones have not been exploredsufficiently with the well-deserved attention. Consequently, a contrastive analysisabout appraisal meanings between English and Chinese discourses would be in partimperative and significant.Moreover, the recruitment advertisement might be an advisable genre for theappraisal meaning analysis with regard to its unique and typical text features. And atpresent, with the advent of Internet, more and more recruiters incline to post theoccupation information on the websites. Thus, in this study, all the English andChinese samples (30recruitment advertisements respectively) would be collectedfrom the authentic professional recruiting websites.On this condition, this thesis aims at investigating three interactive questions,which can be briefly stated as how Appraisal system is distributed and illustrated inboth English and Chinese texts through the calculations of AntConc3.2.2.1andmanual operations, and then what the similarities and differences about appraisalmeanings in the English and Chinese samples are, and finally how the contrastiveresults, differences in particular, are interpreted within two classical interculturalmodels—Hofstede’s collectivism/individualism, high/low uncertainty avoidance andlong-/short-term orientation, as well as Hall’s high/low context. The above contrastive study shows that in terms of discourse semantics, thesimilarities and differences about appraisal meanings are realized either lexically orsyntactically in both English and Chinese recruitment advertisements. And they canvividly reveal the intrinsic characteristics of the recruitment advertisement, such asthe descriptiveness, the negotiability and the intercultural visibility; these differencescan authentically manifest the different ideologies of Chinese and American people inlight of intercultural interpretations. And obviously, both of them would besubservient to the research on the interior features and external functions of language.In addition, it is believed that some illuminations in this thesis might be valuable forthe theoretical and practical applications in the future.