A Contrastive Linguistic Study Of Chinese And American Promotional Discourses Of Online Healthcare Services

“Internet+ Healthcare” is one of the innovative industries with the most rapid development momentum recently.Medical companies are committed to the launch of new online healthcare services,resulting in a lot of promotional discourses.Taking 60 pieces of Chinese and English promotional texts of online healthcare services as the empirical data,the author delves into the relationship between language and cognition by means of both qualitative and quantitative methods,aiming to reveal how the knowledge constructed by language influences readers’ cognition.Based on the structural model of sales promotional letters proposed by Bhatia(1993),force-dynamic models proposed by Tamly(2000)and the concept of cognitive frame construction by Johnston & Noakes(2005),the author targets to analyze how to extract and process information from discourses and explore the constructing processes of cognitive frames contained in discourses.The author finds that: at the discoursal level,different motives expressed by different moves exist in Chinese and English discourses,leading to differences in the discourse structures.At the semantic level,the linguistic expressions employed can be explained through force-dynamics: producers of both Chinese and American promotional discourses tend to use positive stimuli to reinforce a positive impression of their companies and the services or products they offered to highlight their advantages.These recurring moves and linguistic expressions construct relevant frames in reader’s mind and activate their cognition of the services.This thesis enriches the existing cognitive linguistic analyses,and offers enlightenment on how cognitive linguistic elements influence the cognitions embedded in promotional discourses at different levels.