A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Realization In Chinese And English Bank Introductions

In the 21st century,China's economy is more closely connected with the world's economy.The Belt and Road initiative will enable China to further expand and deepen its opening-up,and to strengthen its mutually beneficial cooperation with other countries.The initiative requires the related financial institutions,like banks,to expand into the international market.For banks,the online bank introduction is an important way to present its image and it is also the easiest way for people to know about a bank.Language plays an essential role in the communicative effectiveness.Therefore,in order to know how to expand the bank's market into foreign countries and improve its customer acceptance,the contrastive analysis of the bank introduction's interpersonal meaning is necessary and meaningful.Language is employed to interact with each other in order to establish and keep relations with others or to influence their attitude or behavior.This language function is termed as interpersonal meaning.Its realization may vary due to different social and cultural factors.This thesis makes a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning in a corpus of 60 Chinese and English bank introductions based on the analytical framework combining Halliday's systemic functional grammar with part of Martin's appraisal theory.This paper reveals that the writers of CBIs and EBIs utilize various linguistic resources to realize the interpersonal meaning of bank introductions.After a detailed contrastive analysis,it is found that Chinese and English banks have some similarities,yet a huge difference between them does exist in terms of realization of interpersonal meaning.Similarities can be seen from preference to declarative moods,large amounts of low and median value modal operators and high frequency of appreciation.Disparities between them are outstanding:(1)Exclamatives are only deployed in CBIs.(2)More interrogatives and imperatives are used in EBIs.(3)Median value modal operators are preferred by CBIs while low value modal operators are more frequently distributed in EBIs.(4)EBIs show much more preference to the use of pronoun system,while CBIs tend to employ proper names,i.e.the bank's name.(5)There are relatively more negative attitude resources especially appreciation resources in the EBIs.These differences can be attributed to the different social-cultural backgrounds.By considering social-cultural factors such as power distance,collectivism vs.individualism,uncertainty avoidance and long-term vs short-term orientation,it can be concluded that how different social-cultural factors affect the realization of interpersonal meaning in the bank introductions.