A Contrastive Study Of Interactional Metadiscourse In Letters To Shareholders From Chinese And American Cross-border E-commerce Enterprises

Interactional metadiscourse shows the interactive relationship between the author and the reader,involving the author's intervention and comments.It can be used not only to allow authors to express their own views,but also to enable authors to interact with readers,which plays an important role in conveying the author's intention for cooperation,predicting possible objections and answering questions that readers may ask.Interactional metadiscourse belongs to the interpersonal model of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland(2005a).The genre of previous empirical research on metadiscourse is basically limited to academic articles,and very little studies in other genres,especially in business genre.Based on the interpersonal model of metadiscourse proposed by Hyland(2005a),this study takes the letter to shareholders of cross-border e-commerce enterprises in China and the United States as the research genre,builds two corpora and makes a contrastive analysis of the use of interactional metadiscourse,finding out the specific differences in number and type.Afterwards,this study analyzes the causes of differences based on the international business communication model proposed by Johansen(2012),and selects example sentences to explain the effects of the differences.The results show that the total number of interactional metadiscourse resources in Chinese enterprises' letters to shareholders is greater than that in the United States,especially hedges and self-mentions;however,the use of attitude markers and engagement markers is the opposite.It is found that national culture,business culture and personal culture collectively lead to differences.And these differences bring different effects to the letters.This not only broadens the research genre of metadiscourse,enriches the research model of metadiscourse,and makes up for the lack of linguistic research on the letter to shareholders,but also provides suggestions for Chinese cross-border e-commerce companies to write English letters to shareholders.In a word,this study has not only theoretical significance,but also practical significance.