A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Recruitment Advertising Texts- Systemic Functional Approach

Language is the main medium that people utilize to communicate with each other and the establishment and maintenance of relationship cannot be accomplished without language. Meanwhile, through language, people express their viewpoints on things and events in the world and influence others’ attitudes or behaviors. Above is just what is identified as the interpersonal function or meaning by Halliday and Thompson. The interpersonal meaning research of different types of discourses is recently becoming more and more popular both at home and abroad. However, those researches mostly focus on English discourses while the interpersonal meaning research of Chinese discourses is much fewer. It is of great significance to make a comparative study of interpersonal meaning between English and Chinese discourses for that the realization of interpersonal meaning could vary across different social and cultural contexts.Recruitment advertisements, a discourse typical of interpersonal meaning, are chosen as the research subject in the present thesis. The research is based on a corpus of 20 English recruitment advertisements and 20 Chinese recruitment advertisements, which are selected from the well-known English and Chinese recruiting websites. This thesis, through the integrated framework of Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Martin’s appraisal theory, makes a contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning between English and Chinese recruitment ads at the four levels in detail, that is, mood, modality, person system and appraisal system which includes attitude, graduation and engagement.Through the above-mentioned analysis, it is found that the interpersonal meanings in the job advertisements are realized by means of various kinds of skillful adoptions of different language resources. Though a few similarities are shared by English and Chinese recruitment advertisements in terms of the realization of interpersonal meaning, huge differences still exist. The main similarities can be illustrated as follows:1) declarative mood is widely used; 2) highest frequency of probability; 3) second person is most frequently used; 4) positive judgment has the highest frequency; 5) force-raise tops.The main differences are as follows: 1) interrogatives and imperatives are more frequently used in English recruitment ads while exclamatives are much more welcome by Chinese recruitment ads; 2) English recruitment ads prefer to use more obligation while Chinese recruitment ads use more inclination; 3) English recruitment advertisements use much more personal pronouns than their Chinese counterparts; 4) more positive judgments on the job hunters are used in English recruitment ads whereas in Chinese counterparts they are more likely made on the company and the vacancy; 5) English recruitment ads are more dialogically contractive than Chinese counterparts. Through a comprehensive and profound comparison of the interpersonal meaning realization between English and Chinese recruitment advertisements, this thesis explores the reasons behind these differences and hopes to shed light on English-Chinese or Chinese-English recruitment advertisement translation and composition.