A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Western University Profiles Based On Engagement System In Appraisal Theory

With the leap of China’s economy and the boost of globalization, internationalized university education has been more common than ever. In this case, the English version of university profiles has become a window through which universities publicize themselves and attract talents from all over the world. The Engagement resources embedded in profiles are of significance to study since they reveal the interpersonal meaning encoded in the text.Proposed and developed by linguist Martin and his colleagues in the late 1990s, Appraisal Theory is an extension of Systemic-Functional Linguistics by Halliday. Appraisal Theory consists of three subsystems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Engagement system explores the intervention of language that is to study the attitude and stance adopted by the speaker/writer in the language no matter whenever and wherever he/she is, and thus reflects the realization of interpersonal meaning in the text. So far, Appraisal Theory has been applied to a number of genres such as news report discourse, political speeches, advertising texts and academic commentary, yet application on university profiles is relatively new.A corpus of forty university profiles in which twenty are Chinese university profiles and the other twenty are Western profiles is constructed in this thesis. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined to conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of engagement resources in Chinese and Western profiles. Through discussion and analysis, major finding are listed below:Firstly, overall statistics show that there are more Monoglossic resources than Heteroglossic resources in both Chinese and Western university profiles. As for the subsystems of Heterogloss, more dialogic expansion is employed than dialogic contraction. It is revealed from the distribution that university profiles are embedded with main characteristics of being informative and persuasive. For one thing, university profiles serve as basic conductive and advantageous description of the universities, thereby a great deal of monoglossic resources guarantee the objectivity. For another, with the purpose of establishing a potentially good relationship with readers, the employment of more dialogic expansion is to prevent the profiles appearing rigid and narrow-minded by providing space for possible alternative positions or voices. Secondly, Chinese and Western university profiles apply different proportion of subcategories of dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion. Concerning dialogic expansion, there are more attribute resources than entertain resources in both Chinese and Western profiles, Furthermore, which reveals profile writers’ purpose of better demonstrating universities’ advantages by providing external voices. In terms of dialogic contraction, approximately close amount of proclaim and disclaim resources are employed in Chinese profiles; while the Western counterparts employ more disclaim resources. Statistics above indicate that Chinese university profiles are more inclined to convey information indirectly with great proportion of positive attitude, leaving relatively larger dialogic space for readers. While Western profiles prefer direct statements expressing their own viewpoints with emphasis on informative accuracy, thereby dialogic space left for readers is relatively small. Thirdly, as for subcategories of entertain, attribute, proclaim and disclaim, Chinese profiles have the tendency of employing more counter and endorse resources, more authoritative sources and hearsay are adopted as well, however, preference is given to deny, pronounce resources and non-authoritative sources in Western profiles. It means that Chinese profiles enhance the authoritativeness and reliability to persuade readers by adopting external voices particularly authoritative sources, while Western profiles employ a variety of sources yet not necessarily authoritative sources to diversify the text and simultaneously commit with stronger emotion.This thesis adopts the Engagement system under Appraisal Theory to carry out a comparative analysis of Chinese and Western university profiles. Theoretically, it proves that it is applicable for Appraisal Theory to analyze university profiles, and it will be helpful in furthering the development of Appraisal theory and broadening the vision of its application in different texts. Practically, proper instructions on the writing of university profiles may be provided.