A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Corporate Chairmen’s Statements In English Language At Home And Abroad

On the basis of Halliday’s model of interpersonal meaning and Martin’sappraisal theory, this thesis makes a contrastive study of interpersonal meaning of20chairmen’s statements in English language from five foreign English-speaking banksand five domestic banks. The analysis is mainly carried out in terms of mood,modality and evaluative lexis. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adoptedin an effort to gain an insight into the features of the realizations of interpersonalmeaning in chairmen’s statements and the similarities and differences of chairmen’sstatements at home and abroad.The thesis summarizes the similarities shared by domestic and foreignchairmen’s statements in realizing interpersonal meaning. The major similaritiesinclude:1) that in terms of mood, declarative clauses and first person pronouns arepredominant, and a number of past, present and future tenses are employed;2) thatmedian value operators have the highest proportion,3) and within appraisal system,attitude overweighs graduation and engagement. The differences between chairmen’sstatements at home and abroad are also identified:1) that in terms of mood, thesecond person pronoun “you” is less common in the domestic data;2) that there aremore high value modal operators in foreign corpus;3) and that among the evaluativelexis, tenacity and balance are more frequent, and valuation and denying are lesscommon in chairmen’s statements at home.Since more and more Chinese companies want to be listed abroad and attractforeign investors, it is imperative for them to understand how interpersonal meaningin idiomatic chairmen’s statements is realized by linguistic devices. It is expectedthat the results drawn from this study can shed some light for Chinese companies ondrafting chairmen’s statements in English language.