| In recent years, with the rapid development of Internet, more and more people begin toissue online dating advertisements to seek their potential spouse. Compared with traditionalmedia, this way is easy and convenient, and there are more opportunities to be known by thosepeople who meet the requirements.The main purpose of online dating advertisements is to attract the potential mate and urgethem to get in touch with the advertiser. In order to realize this aim, the advertisers usually paymuch attention to their feelings, their characters, their ideas towards human beings and things,and their requirements for the potential mate. The information reflects Affect, Judgement andAppreciation, which are three subsystems of Attitude System. Attitude System is the core ofAppraisal Theory proposed by linguist Martin. At the same time, it is unavoidable for us to beinfluenced by social and cultural factors in writing online dating advertisements. In addition, itis influenced by the gender of the advertiser. Thus, the present research makes a tentative studyto explore the social and cultural backgrounds of online dating advertisements by comparingthe similarities and differences of attitudinal resources in online Chinese dating advertisements(OCDAs) and online English dating advertisements (OEDAs). The contrast of attitudinalresources in OEDAs and OCDAs will facilitate the translation of dating advertisements and itcan help us to understand them better..The data in the present study are collected respectively from three online dating websites:Match.com, Date.com and Jiayuan.com. On Match.com and Date.com,30female OEDAs and30male OEDAs are collected by specifying the gender online. In the same way,30femaleOCDAs and30male OCDAs are gathered from Jiayuan.com. Eventually, two corpora of60OEDAs and60OCDAs are collected respectively for the study.According to the analysis of the data, we found that:（1）There are abundant attitude resources in online dating advertisements. They can bedivided into three categories: Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. The number and percent ofthem are varied. Affect and Judgement appear frequently. Judgement takes the first place, Affectis next, and Appreciation is the least. In terms of realization, verb is the main way to realizeAffect, and adjective is the crucial realization of Judgement and Appreciation.（2）In terms of OCDAs and OEDAs, OCDAs use more Judgement andAppreciation thanOEDAs, while OEDAs use more Affect than OCDAs. Both in OCDAs and OEDAs, positiveattitude resources occur more frequently than negative ones. The number of negative Affect resources in OEDAs is larger than that in OCDAs. At the same time, more negative Judgementand Appreciation resources are employed in OCDAs than those in OEDAs.（3）In terms of genders, females use more Affect and Appreciation than males, whilemales use more Judgement than females.（4）These similarities and differences are related to cultural differences and languagehabits, and they are also influenced by the gender of the advertiser. It is important for us toknow them in promoting and conducting intercultural communication and transnationalmarriage. |
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