A Contrastive Study Of Business Ethics Review Discourse In Chinese And English: From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Function

Interpersonal meaning, as one the three meta-functions of language, has longbeen discussed by scholars and a wide range of definition has been proposed.However, linguists are unanimously in an agreement that interpersonal is the meaningof language by which they not only interact in communication and express theirfeelings and attitudes, but also establish and maintain their relationship. The languagethey use in their interaction both reflects and influences the bilateral relationship. Therecent decades has witnessed the popularity at home and abroad in discussion andstudied on interpersonal meaning with a variety of approaches ranging frompragmatics, social linguistics to rhetorical study and discourse linguistics. Even thecontrastive study on interpersonal meaning is still insignificant in number, but theincreasing number of such study shows that it is on a trend of growth. However, asearch of such study demonstrates that few of the studies are conducted on businessethics review texts, which constitutes a genuine blank in the corpus for interpersonalmeaning realization. And since buinsess ethics has been gaining increasing popularityand attention in recent years, hence the study of business ethics texts boasts practicalsignificance; also owing to the features of comment texts, the interpersonal meaningis mainly realized by appraisal resourcs in business ethics review texts. Meanwhile, asthe interpersonal meaning realization varies because of different social environmentsand cultural context, the comparison and contrast of the interpersonal meaningrealization in Chinese and English business ethics review texts is critical for us tounderstand the ethical standards, realization methods, and to guide the writing ofmedia and business public relaitons. Business ethics review text, as its name suggests, is a type of review mainly aboutobserving and commenting on some behaviors and phenomenon in business. Becauseof the fact that business ethics review texts mainly focus on comment, hence,compared with other texts, its utilization of appraisal resources is higher in frequency.Meanwhile, In the comment, the review not only points out what is unethical, but alsoconvey the information about what is ethical and what should be done, through whicha writer-reader interpersonal relationship can be naturally construed and theinterpersonal meaning can be easily realized.Based on the this belief, the present author establishes a corpus including30Chinese business ethics review texts and30English business ethics review texts toexplore how each of them realizes the interpersonal meaning and how they differ fromand resemble each other. The analysis is conducted at both lexical-grammatical leveland semantic level in terms of mood structure, modality, attitude, engagement andgraduation and adopts the qualitative and quantitative methodology.A thorough analysis of the corpus and a statistic calculation reveals that theinterpersonal meaning in both Chinese business ethics reviews and English businessethics reviews is realized by skillful deployment of linguistic resources. To be specific,with respect to mood system, both Chinese writer and English-speaking writer utilizedeclaratives to give information to readers; in regard to modality system, since thetexts involve the direction and instruction of ethical behaviors, both Chinese andEnglish texts employ obligation with high frequency, which is demonstrated by thelexical resouces like “should”,“be supposed to” and “ought to”; however, to reducethe degree of subjectivity and to maintain the inherent flavor of seriousness ofbusiness text, neither of them employs excessive “affect”: Chinese business ethicsreview texts utilize judgment to comment on the ethicalness of business behaviorwhilst English ones take appreciation. When it comes to engagement, it is discoveredthat both Chinese and English writers deploy high-frequency dialogue contract. Whenviewed from their comparison, specific difference can be exposed: Chinese employ more dialgogue contract while English ones utilize more dialogue more dialogueexpand. Regarding graduation system, both Chinese and English business ethicsreview texts adopt high proportion of force than focus, while the force intensificationand focus sharpen are far higher than their counterparts in frequency.More similarities and differences between them are presented in this study inmore specific aspects. Before the closing of this thesis, the author attempts to give abrief explanation of the reasons behind the similarities and differences from thecultural differences. The implications are also concluded to support the significance ofthis research.