A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Job Advertisements On The Internet-A Systemic Functional Approach

People use language to interact with others,to establish and maintain relations with them,to influence others' attitude or behavior,or to express their own viewpoints on things in the world,which is identified as the interpersonal meaning or interpersonal function by Halliday and Thomson.Presently,interpersonal meaning research of different types of discourses is becoming increasingly popular both at home and abroad.However,compared with the foreign researches on interpersonal meaning,the domestic studies is relatively few.Therefore,it is of great significance to make a contrastive study between Chinese and English discourses since the realization of interpersonal meaning may vary across different cultural and social contexts.In the present thesis,job advertisements,a discourse typical of interpersonal meaning are chosen as the research subject.The research is based on a corpus of 30 Chinese job advertisements(Chinese ads) and 30 English job advertisements(English ads),which are selected from the well-known Chinese and English websites at random.Based on the integrated framework of Halliday's systemic functional grammar and Martin's appraisal theory,together with Geert Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions for International Business,this thesis fulfill a contrastive analysis of interpersonal meaning between Chinese job ads and English job ads on the Internet at the four levels in detail,namely mood,modality,person system and appraisal system, including attitude,graduation and engagement.Through the above-mentioned analysis,it can be identified that the writers of Chinese job ads and English job ads skillfully adopt different linguistic resources to realize the interpersonal meaning in the job advertisements on the Internet.Though the Chinese job ads and English job ads share a few similarities in terms of the realization of interpersonal meaning,there still exist huge differences.The main similarities are illustrated as follows:1) declarative mood is preferred;2) Probability has the highest frequency;3) second person pronouns tops;4) positive judgment ranks highest;5) force-raise has the highest frequencyThe main differences are as follows:1) English job ads use more interrogatives and imperatives than the Chinese counterparts,while the Chinese job ads prefer to use exclamatives,which are rarely seen in the English counterparts 2) English job ads use more obligation than the Chinese counterparts,while the Chinese job ads tend to use more inclination.3) English job ads use more personal pronouns than their Chinese counterparts 4) English job ads are inclined to use more positive judgments the potential candidates whereas the Chinese counterparts tend to use more positive judgments on the company and the vacancy 5) English job ads are more dialogically contractive than Chinese counterparts.By making a comprehensive and profound comparison,this thesis explores the reasons behind these differences by means of Geert Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions for International Business so as to shed light on Chinese-English or English-Chinese job advertisement translation and composition.