| It is well recognized that the company profile in corporate website is an importantcomponent of the corporate image publicity. Company profiles focus on providing necessaryinformation about its history, values, products, cultures and services, which can give reader agood impression of the company and improve its image in reader’s mind. In recent years,scholars at home and abroad have conducted profound researches on interpersonal meaningsof various English and Chinese discourses, including company profiles. Whereas fewresearches have been done on English company profiles, and related researches from thesystemic functional grammar perspective are even rare. Thus, based on the interpersonaltheory of systemic functional grammar, the present study intends to explore the realization ofinterpersonal meaning in English Company Profile discourse, aiming to analyze and discusshow the interpersonal meaning is realized and reflected in such discourses.Interpersonal meaning originates from the partition of metafunctions of language insystemic functional grammar. It is concerned with the strand of meaning produced when weuse language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, toinfluence their behavior, to express our own viewpoints on things in the world, and to elicit orchange theirs. According to Halliday, the mood and modality systems are the basic means torealize interpersonal meaning. However, many other scholars regard it as inadequate asMartin emphasizes that the interpersonal meaning can be realized by evaluation in theappraisal theory. This research makes a critical view of the previous studies of interpersonalmeaning and analyzes the realization of interpersonal meaning from four aspects: mood,modality, person system and evaluation in the ECPs.Thirty English company profiles of top500companies on English websites as the corpusare taken in this thesis with the help of UAM CorpusTool2.8.11to explore how to realizeinterpersonal meaning, deliver company information, and reach the discourse target. Thisresearch adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The former is employedto make a statistical analysis of the distributions and applications of interpersonal meanings while the latter is carried out to provide relevant and reasonable explanations and logicalarguments.The findings of this research are as follows:1) In the mood system, declaratives are themost frequently employed mood in ECPs to introduce the history, values, products, services,and other information of the company. Besides, interrogatives and imperatives are also usedin ECPs.2) In ECPs, low and median value modal operators are more frequently distributedto express the writer of the company’s willingness to service the readers or customers withthe attitude of politeness and consultation.3) In person system, ECPs show much preferenceto the use of pronoun system especially the first person pronouns. Some nouns (the name ofthe company) are mentioned in the beginning of the discourse.4) The utilization of theappraisal theory indicates that the ECPs suggest readers to accept their product, services, andculture by applying different evaluating words and expressions.There are great theoretical and practical significance to explore the realization ofinterpersonal meaning in English Company Profile discourse based on systemic functionalgrammar and appraisal theory. On one hand, the study of the interpersonal meaning in ECPscan enrich the theory itself and provide material for further study. On the other hand, it canstimulate our understanding on ECPs in the perspective of interpersonal meaning which couldhelp with English teaching and make ECPs writing more standard in the future. |
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