A Study Of Metadiscourse In Chinese And American Corporate Profiles

Corporate profiles can serve as an effective publicity tool for companies to establish a good image to convince the customers and investors.From the perspective of rhetorical persuasion,this study explores how metadiscourse realizes rational appeals,credible appeals and affective appeals in corporate profiles.Meanwhile,it also tries to find out the similarities and differences in the use of metadiscourse between Chinese and American corporate profiles,as well as the possible factors that account for the differences.This study adopts both qualitative and quantitative analysis to probe into the use of metadiscourse in Chinese and American corporate profiles.Two small corpora respectively with 50 Chinese and 50 American corporate profiles selected from Fortune Global 500,2018 are compiled.The AntConc Tool is applied to count the frequency of metadiscourse resources in these two corpora.On the micro-level,a corpus-based quantitative analysis is carried out to investigate the frequency of various metadiscourse resources in these two corpora,based on the interpersonal model and searching list provided by Hyland(2005).On the meso-level,a qualitative analysis is conducted to explore how metadiscourse helps to realize persuasion,according to Aristotle's three rhetorical means of persuasion,namely,rational appeal,credible appeal and affective appeal.On the macro-level,the factors accounting for the differences in the use of metadiscourse are analyzed,based on Johansen's(2012)international business communication model.The major findings can be summarized as follows:(1)The total number of metadiscourse resources in American corpus is larger than that in Chinese corpus and the number of interactional metadiscourse in American corpus is far more than that in Chinese corpus.Besides,the frequency of interactive metadiscourse in these two corpora is relatively similar and the most frequently-used subcategories in two corpora are basically the same.However,thereare significant differences in the frequency of some subcategories and some metadiscourse items between the two corpora.(2)Persuasion is mainly achieved through three means of appeals.Transitions,endophoric markers,frame markers and code glosses can help the authors of the corporate profiles to better organize the discourse,thus achieving rational appeals.Hedges,evidentials,boosters and self mentions help to realize credible appeals.Attitude markers,engagement markers,self mentions and hedges make readers feel closer to the authors,contributing to affective appeals.American writers tend to make more credible and affective appeals.(3)National culture,organizational culture and personal factors jointly account for the differences in the use of metadiscourse between Chinese and American corporate profiles.