A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of APPRAISAL Resources In Chinese And American English Company Profiles

Along with the deepening of global economic exchanges, the role company profiles play in cross cultural economic communication is increasingly crucial. However, research on company profile mainly focus on genre, stylistic, and translation studies. APPRAISAL research, which investigate the communication going between the text and the putative readers, do not receive due attention.In order to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and American company profiles on the distribution and realization of Appraisal resources, as well as tracing the social and cultural factors underlying these similarities and differences,100Chinese and American English company profiles are adopted from2013Forbes2000for the present study. With the help of the UAM Corpus Tool, we conduct a quantitative and qualitative study and find the following results:In general, both of Chinese company profiles (CCP) and American company profiles (ACP) are loaded with Appraisal resources helping achieving interpersonal meaning by way of making alliance with the putative readers through expressing strengthened attitude, emotion and the displaying of different voices. Attitude, Appreciation and Focus are generally preferred in both CCP and ACP, while Engagement (heterogloss) and Focus rarely occurs. ACP registers a significantly larger proportion of Affect. Contract is favored in ACP while Expend dominates CCP. CCP owns much more Mass resources. The underling reasons for differences can be summarized into the following four abstracts:the social code of ethics, speech style, writing style and argumentative style. As for lexical-grammatical realizations, though both CCP and ACP share the same fashion of using certain realization method, ACP writers are generally more capable of strategically utilizing diversified realizations.