A Comparative Study Of Modality In English And Chinese Job Advertisements On The Internet

In recent years, with the development of economic globalization, more and morecorporations go out of the domestic market to get involved in the fast-developing globaleconomy. One crucial point of the existence and success of corporations, according to theeconomist, is whether they can recruit talented employees or not. Therefore, the jobadvertisement, which acts as a medium for interaction between employers and employees,plays a significant role in the recruiting process. However, researches on job advertisementshaven’t drawn much attention. According to the author’s investigation, most of the studies onjob advertisements till now mainly focus on genre analysis. Only a few studies are conductedfrom the perspective of systemic-functional grammar, not to mention the systematic studiesof modality in job advertisements. Therefore, the present thesis attempts to make acomparative study of modality between English and Chinese job advertisements on theInternet.In the present research,30English job advertisements and30Chinese jobadvertisements are collected randomly from two well-known and professional recruitingwebsites. Based on the theoretical framework of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar,this study takes both quantitative and qualitative methods so as to fulfill the comparativeanalysis of modality between English and Chinese job advertisements on the Internet in fouraspects in detail, namely modality type, orientation, value and polarity, aiming at exploringthe similarities and differences in these four aspects in the two corpora. Meanwhile, thepresent study attempts to discuss the possible reasons causing the similarities and differences.The result of the comparative study shows that there are both similarities and differencesin the application of modality system in English and Chinese job advertisements on theInternet. The main similarities are presented as follows:1. As for the type of modality, thetwo target texts have similar frequencies in modalization and modulation. Besides, the totalnumber of modalization is larger than that of modulation in both corpora.2. Referring toorientation of modality, subjective explicit orientation and objective explicit orientation areless employed, while subjective implicit orientation is preferred in both of the two corpora. Some significant differences are found as well due to different cultures:1. Regardingorientation of modality, Chinese recruiters use more expressions to show objective implicitorientation than English ones.2. As far as value of modality is considered, more high-valueand median-value modal expressions are found in English corpus, while more low-valuemodal expressions appear in Chinese corpus.3. From the perspective of polarity, the Englishrecruiters tend to frequently use positive modal expressions, while the Chinese are likely touse more negative modal expressions in job advertisements.By making a comprehensive and profound comparison, this thesis extends the scope ofthe application of modality theory and deepens the understanding of linguistic devices ofmodality and their functions in job advertisements. Furthermore, this study may contribute tothe successful creation of job advertisements and shed light on Chinese-English andEnglish-Chinese job advertisements translation.