A Comparative Study On Interpersonal Meaning In English And Chinese Online Recruitment Advertisement Of Business Assistant-from The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Language is a means for communication, by which people express ideas and change others’ attitude or behaviors, thus establishing and maintaining relationships with them. This function of language is referred as interpersonal meaning. As a media for communication between recruiters and applicants, recruitment advertisements are typical discourse for interpersonal meaning analysis, so it is significant to make a research. In view of the representative and extensive characteristic, this paper regards recruitment advertisement of business assistant as research object and selects 30 recruitment advertisements of business assistant respectively from the most authentic recruitment websites in China and America. It studies the interpersonal meaning in English and Chinese online recruitment advertisement of business assistant based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory. This thesis analyzes from the three subcategories of Appraisal Theory, attitude, engagement and graduation, aiming to explore the application and distribution of appraisal resources in English and Chinese online recruitment advertisement of business assistant.The comparative study shows, the application and distribution of appraisal resources in English and Chinese online recruitment advertisement of business assistant share great similarities and there are still differences between them. To sum up, both employ a considerate number of appraisal resources to realize interpersonal meaning, but the number in English recruitment advertisements is larger than that in Chinese ones. Specifically speaking, similarities are shown as follows: 1) in attitude system, the distribution of affect, judgment and appreciation of both corpora are similar, and they all give priority to judgment resources; 2) in engagement system, the majority of engagement resources are heteroglossic resources rather than monoglossic resources in both corpora. Besides, the distribution of dialogic contraction are almost same, which are mainly realized through disclaim resources; 3) in graduation system, there are much more force resources than focus resources. And in focus resources, both tend to use soften resources.The differences are as follows. 1) in attitude system, Chinese recruitment advertisements prefer to use un/happiness resources while English advertisements prefer dis/satisfaction resources; 2) in engagement system, the heteroglossic resources in English recruitment advertisements of business assistant are more abundant, and English recruitment advertisements adopt more dialogic expansion resources and Chinese recruitment advertisements are more likely to employ dialogic contraction resources; 3) in graduation system, there are more quantification resources in English recruitment advertisements while more intensification resources in Chinese recruitment advertisements.Through comparative analysis of the appraisal resources in Chinese and English recruitment advertisements, this research clearly shows the similarities and differences of Chinese and English recruitment advertisements in the realization of interpersonal meaning, laying foundations for further learning from each other and achieving the effective conveying of interpersonal meaning. What’s more, it sheds light on the recruitment advertisement compiling and interpretation of Chinese and English recruitment advertisements.