A Comparative Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning Between The English Corporate Profiles Of Chinese Companies And American Companies Based On Corpus Study

A good company image is essentially important for a company togain good reputation and attract more customers. In modern society, thereare various ways for a company to propaganda themselves, among whichthe corporate profile is one of the most convenient ways to get access to acompany. In recent years, many linguists have studied corporate profilesfrom the ideational function and textual function. However, research oninterpersonal meaning in corporate profiles is not enough and thecomparative study on corporate profiles is even less.The theis attempts to make a contrastive analysis of the interpersonalmeaning in English corporate profiles of American companies andChinese companies, based on the systemic functional grammar theory. Onone hand, the thesis aims at finding out how English corporate profiles ofAmerican companies and Chinese companies help interact and shapeappropriate relations between companies and potential customers. On theother hand, the thesis also aims at exploring the similarities anddifferences in interpersonal meaning between English corporate profilesof American companies and Chinese companies as well as the possiblereasons for the similarities and differences.The thesis collects35English corporate profiles from thehomepages of132American corporations listed in the2013globalfortune500corporations. And the thesis also collects35English corporate profiles from the homepages of79Chinese corporations listedin the2013global fortune500corporations. Based on the data, we buildcorpus A containing35English corporate profiles of American companiesand corpus B containing35English corporate profiles of Chinesecompanies. The paper adopts both the quantitative and qualitative methodto reveal the linguistic strategies for realizing interpersonal meaning incorpus A and corpus B. By using AntConc, distributions and frequenciesof the mood structures, modality expressions and pronoun system incorpus A and corpus B are calculated respectively. Then the figures arecompared with SPSS software to find whether there are significantdifferences between them and further explanations for the differences arediscussed in detail. Quantitative approach provides statistical support forthe corporate profiles, while qualitative approach is applied to givedescriptions and interpretations of the texts.It is found that although China and America belong to differentcultures, results show that they share certain similarities in interpersonalmeaning of corporate profiles. Mood system, modality system andpronoun system are all considered to be important approaches to realizeinterpersonal meaning of language and help interact and shapeappropriate relations between potential customers and companies inCorpus A and Corpus B. However, differences lie in the fact that the threetypes of devices to realize interpersonal meaning of language play a more active role in English corporate profiles of American companies thanEnglish corporate profiles of Chinese companies. The differences ofinterpersonal meaning between Corpus A and Corpus B are due tocultural differences between China and America, such as individualismand collectivism, high power distance and low power distance as well asgreat attention to face and less attention to face.Thus, it is necessary for our Chinese corporations to attach moreattention on the application of such devices in order to better understandthe interpersonal meaning of language in corporate profiles. It is hopedthat this thesis can help Chinese enterprises in the international marketcompose more effective English corporate profiles to better marketthemselves. It’s also hoped that the thesis can provide some new insightsto the study of interpersonal function and the comparative study ofAmerican and Chinese cultures, as well as give some enlightment to theteaching of business English writing.