A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In English And Chinese Claim Letters:Systemic Functional Grammar Approach

As trade activities developing prosperously, business letter becomes one of the most frequently used media of communication. Business letter plays a key role in both domestic and international trading activities. In the process of trade cooperation, conflicts cannot be avoided. Under this situation, the suffered party has the right of lodging claim against the defaulter. When the conflict happens, two trade parties will use claim letters to negotiate with each other. According to the contract, the suffered party can ask for compensation to defend his rights in trade activities. The suffered party often lodges claim against late delivery, defective goods, shortage of goods, bad packing, etc. And the purpose of claim letter is to solve these conflicts and problems and maintain cooperative trading relationship between two parties. To a great extent, words and expressions in claim letters reveal writer’s attitude and opinion. And interpersonal meanings in claim letters are mainly expressed by these linguistic devices. Different linguistic expressions of two languages also influence the realization of interpersonal meaning in English and Chinese claim letters. What is more, social-culture factor may be one of the underlying reasons for different realizations of interpersonal meaning in English and Chinese claim letters. Therefore, this research aims to explore the similarities and differences of interpersonal meanings in English and Chinese claim letters.The theoretical framework of this thesis consists of Halliday’s interpersonal meta-function theory, Martin’s appraisal theory and other means that realize interpersonal meanings. A contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning in15English claim letters and15Chinese ones is conducted through mood system, modality system, appraisal system, person system and tense system. In order to ensure the validity of this research, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to explore the way of realizing interpersonal meaning in English and Chinese claim letters. Through detailed analysis, it is found that both similarities and differences exist in English and Chinese claim letters.Similarities can be summarized as follows:1) declaratives are the major sentence structures in both English and Chinese claim letters. Neither interrogative mood nor exclamative mood exists in English and Chinese claim letters.2) It can be found that massive low and median value modal verbs are adopted in English and Chinese samples.3) Attitude resources are widely used in both English and Chinese claim letters so as to maintain trading relationship with the reader.4) It shows that the first and second person pronouns are more frequently used than the third person pronoun in both English and Chinese claim letters.5) Past and present tenses are widely adopted in English and Chinese claim letters.The differences are also obvious:1) According to the corpus of30claim letters, more imperative sentences are used in English claim letters than that in Chinese ones.2) Chinese claim letters are more likely to choose low value operators than that in English claim letters. English claim letters tend to use median value modal operators instead.3) Compared with Chinese samples, more force value words are presented in English ones.4) Writers of English claim letters are more willing to use the first person pronoun to realize interpersonal function. However, Chinese people prefer to use the second person pronoun and its polite forms to show respect and politeness to the reader in claim letters.This thesis hopes to not only enrich studies on interpersonal meaning of business letters, but also help people to focus on the writing of claim letters with appropriate words and expressions. As is well-known, cultural and social factors have great influence on language expressions. Therefore, the way of realizing interpersonal meaning in claim letters between two languages is different. It is necessary for us to pay attention to the social-cultural factors when we start to write claim letters. In order to write appropriate claim letters, it is imperative to enhance our cultural awareness and understand different cultures in international trading activities in the future.