| People express their views on things through language and influence the behaviors or attitudes of others,which is identified as the interpersonal meaning or interpersonal function by Halliday and Thompson.At present,the study of interpersonal meaning of different types of discourse is becoming increasingly popular.However,these studies mainly concentrate in the English discourse,yet the Chinese discourse is less studied.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning in Chinese and English discourse.This paper makes a comparative analysis of the interpersonal meaning in the corpus of 50 English and Chinese job advertisements on the Internet based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar.In addition,this paper attempts to answer the following questions:(1)how is the interpersonal meaning realized in terms of mood,modality and person system in Chinese and English job advertisements?(2)what are the similarities and the differences on interpersonal meaning of Chinese and English job advertisements?(3)what are the possible reasons of the differences between Chinese and English job advertisements?Through the contrastive analysis,it can be seen that the advertisers of English and Chinese job advertisements skillfully utilize various linguistic resources to realize the interpersonal meaning in the job advertisements on the Internet.Although the English and Chinese job advertisements share a few similarities with regard to the realization of the interpersonal function,huge differences still exist.The main similarities are presented as follows:(1)declarative mood structure is mostly adopted;(2)probability accounts for the highest percentage;(3)first person pronouns are widely used.As for the main differences,it can be illustrated as follows:(1)there are more exclamative mood structures in Chinese job advertisements,while imperative mood structures and interrogative mood structures are often used in English job advertisements;(2)English job advertisements prefer to adopt more obligation,while Chinese job advertisements adopt more inclination;(3)The frequency of personal pronouns in Chinese job advertisements is lower than those in English job advertisements;(4)Chinese jobadvertisements are willing to use the unique form “您” to express courtesy and respect,while English job advertisements only have a single form of you.The differences are mainly due to social-cultural backgrounds.Through the study of social-cultural factors like collectivism vs.individualism,power distance,low-context culture vs.high-context culture and traditional thought,it can be found that how different social-cultural factors affect the realization of interpersonal meaning in Chinese and English job advertisements.In addition,the author also hopes to shed light on the translation and composition of English-Chinese or Chinese-English job advertisements through the contrastive analysis on interpersonal meaning of English and Chinese job advertisements. |
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