A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In English And Chinese Business Apology Texts

Based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar,60 business apology texts (30 in English and 30 in Chinese, which are all carefully selected from the internet) are examined from perspectives of mood, modality and person quantitatively and qualitatively, with purposes of assessing how interpersonal meanings are constructed in these two kinds of texts, making clear the similarities and differences between them and thus digging out the possible social-cultural factors leading to these differences.The result of the contrastive analysis shows that English and Chinese business apology texts share similarities, yet striking differences do exist between them. Similarities can be seen from mass use of declaratives, no interrogative mood, more mood adjuncts than comment adjuncts, large quantities of median value modal operators, preference to projecting clauses showing the subjective explicit orientation, and extensive distribution of first person pronouns, etc.Main differences lie in:(1) With regard to mood, exclamatives could be found in Chinese, but not in English. Besides, imperatives occur more frequently in English than in Chinese (3.5%v.s.1.5%). (2) In the aspect of modality, more mood adjuncts are applied in Chinese than in English (368v.s.258). More specifically, adjuncts of mood rather than adjuncts of temporality are more frequently used in English while in Chinese, the reverse applies. The most frequently used subtype of mood adjunct is polarity in English while it is time in Chinese. More comment adjuncts are adopted in English than in Chinese with 30 to 9. While comment adjuncts of entreaty, desirability and evaluation are used in English, only the type entreaty is adopted in Chinese. Moreover, far more modal operators are used in English than in Chinese with 288 to 89. With regard to metaphors of modality, the frequency of them in English is higher than that in Chinese with 81 to 24. (3) As to person, the total number of person pronouns in English is much larger than that in Chinese (1018v.s.234). While Chinese business apology texts use "您/您的" more in the second person system, there are no such polite forms in English. In addition, third person pronouns are much more frequently used in English (17.2%v.s.2.1%). They are often used to represent the third party, the objects as well as people apologised to. But in Chinese, they generally stand for the third party.These differences are attributable partially to the different social cultures. Such social-cultural factors as the low/high context dimension, future-oriented v.s. past-oriented, individualism v.s. collectivism and low/high power distance are considered in this thesis.