A Comparative Study On Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And American Company Profiles From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

Company profiles,as a way of introducing a company's history,products and services,culture and vision,etc.to readers,play a significant role in building good reputation for the company and establishing interpersonal relationship between the company and its potential customers.Therefore,it is of great importance to study the interpersonal function of company profiles.Halliday's interpersonal model holds that interpersonal meaning is embodied at the lexical and grammatical level of discourse and it is realized through mood,modality and person system.As the development and complement of Systemic Functional Grammar,Martin's Appraisal Theory studies interpersonal meaning mainly through the attitude system at the semantic level.In recent years,studies and comparative studies on interpersonal meaning of company profiles are mostly conducted from the perspective of Halliday's interpersonal model.However,Martin's Appraisal Theory is rarely used.In view of this,the present study attempts to conduct a comparative analysis of interpersonal meaning in Chinese and American company profiles under a combined framework of Halliday's interpersonal model and Martin's Appraisal Theory with the aim to find out how the interpersonal meaning is realized and what the similarities and differences are in the realization of interpersonal meaning in these two kinds of company profiles.In addition,this study also tries to employ the cultural factors to explain the differences.In this thesis,30 Chinese and 30 American company profiles are collected as samples and both quantitative and qualitative approach are adopted.With the help of AntConc and UAM Corpus Tool,the quantitative analysis shows how the mood,modality,person and attitude resources are distributed while the qualitative approach analyzes the texts detailedly.After a comprehensive analysis,it is found that both Chinese and American companies employ a large number of mood,modality,person and attitude devices to realize interpersonal meaning in their profiles.However,there still exist significant differences between them and the differences are mainly caused by the two countries' different orientation of power distance,uncertainty avoidance,collectivism and individualism,and high and low context.