| Genre analysis has a long-established tradition in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy since the time of Aristotle. But recently the interest in the analysis of non-literary genres has gone up. This paper tries to put forward a new model to conduct a comparative analysis of the genre of College President’s Online Welcome Messages (CPOWM) at home and abroad from both macro and micro aspects.The new model combines the genre analysis theory developed by Swales and Bhatia (move analysis) and the Systemic-Functional analysis by Halliday and Martin.By this model, ten typical moves are found in the genre of CPOWM. They are extending welcome at the beginning, giving a general evaluation, establishing background, illustrating capabilities and strengths, demonstrating international cooperation and exchange, achievements, stating mission, describing authors’feelings, extending welcome at the end and signing off. Furthermore, in comparison of the move structures between CPOWM at home and abroad, it is found that CPOWM of Chinese universities and foreign universities employ quite different strategies to realize each move although they include the same10moves.On studies of linguistic features of this genre, a Systemic-Functional analysis can provide a more delicate examination of this question and uncover the linguistic features that characterize the genre. Furthermore, this approach is essentially necessary for a fuller understanding of the linguistic meanings encoded in this genre and the functions of the writers’lexical-grammatical choices that achieve the communicative purpose of this genre. In this paper, we exam the linguistic features of this genre at home and abroad by exploiting two meta-functions’realization systems, namely, the transitive-process system, mood, modality and appraisal system which belong to the core section of the framework of Systemic-Functional linguistics. It is found that material process, relational process and mental process are used in this genre to realize the ideational meaning; Modal verbs are seldom used in realizing the mood of this genre; past tense is used more often in CPOWM at home than that in CPOWM abroad; positive verbs and nouns appear in a great amount in this genre. It is also discovered that the means of realizing meta-functions has a close relation with the distribution of the moves in this genre.The significance of this study can be concluded as follows. First, the research findings of this paper can help people have a deeper understanding of this genre which has been overlooked for a long time. Second, though the comparison between the genre of CPOWM at home and abroad from aspects of their rhetorical move structure and the linguistic features, our study can serve as a practical guidance to Chinese universities in the writing of President’s online welcome message with an aim to facilitate the cross-cultural academic exchanges between Chinese and foreign universities. |
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