A Study On Online English Recruitment Advertisements From Adaptation Theory

With the development of high-tech technology and the Internet, the English recruitment advertisements as one of the new research objects, have drawn the attention of many scholars. Current researches of scholars are done mainly from the perspective of system-functional linguistics and genre. The studies from the pragmatic angle, especially from the Adaptation Theory are rare. Verschueren holds that using language includes making various language choices from both the language building level and the strategy level.Based on the Adaptation Theory and by analyzing the recruitment advertising language, adopting a qualitative study, with a constrained data chosen from recruitment websites: www.monster.com, www.careerbuilder.com and www.Linedin.com etc, this paper attempts to explain how language choice-making realizes the adaptation to the mental world, the social world and physical world. It is found out that in terms of the mental world, through language choice-making, emotive elements include the need for shortened psychological distance and the caring of the company and the cognitive elements include the need for detailed position information and comprehensive company information. In terms of the social world, language choices are actively made to adapt to the target social group and social culture. In terms of physical world, language choices are made to adapt to time and space.As a result, it is suggested that when writing recruitment advertisements, the writer should not only pay attention to the cognitive and emotive elements of the applicants, but also to the target candidates and social culture. What’s more, in the process of language choice, the adaptation to the time and space should be considered.