| In recent years,with the fast development of Chinese economy and the open door policy,more and more Chinese companies have concentrated on both the development of domestic and foreign market.However,how to use advertising strategies to attract more overseas companies and potential customers’ attention has become an important issue to the Chinese state-owned banks.The five Chinese state-owned banks put overviews on each official website,while only two of the banks(ABC and BOC)put the English version for foreigners.HSBC makes an outstanding achievement in the aspect of marketing strategy.Numerous researchers conduct research on the marketing and advertising strategy from the perspective of linguistics and economics.Therefore,in order to modify the writing style of ABC and BOC to cater for the overseas market and put forwards implications for the other three banks,the thesis adopts Systemic Functional Grammar to make analysis of the overview from ABC,BOC and HSBC to make comparison.Systemic Functional Grammar which is put forward by Halliday has been widely concentrated and aims to analyze discourse from various genres.It emphasizes on the meaning potentials and includes three metafunctions: experiential function,interpersonal function and textual function.Therefore,the thesis conducts research to make the difference and similarities from the three aspects.The research question is how do Chinese state-owned banks compose overviews on their official websites to English speakers compared the overview from HSBC in terms of the three metafunctions? The research method is to adopt the software UAM Corpus tool to gain the percentage and numbers to analyze the similarities and differences of the three texts.Through the contrastive analysis,it is found that in the experiential function,Chinese banks tend to adopt the third person point of view to present the information,while HSBC uses “I” and “we” to make the relationship with readers more closer.The material process is the frequent type in the BOC and ABC text.HSBC uses both material process and mental process to state features of the bank.In the interpersonal function,the Chinese banks adopt past tense while HSBC tends to use present and future tense.In addition,Chinese banks use many passive sentences to state features,which reduces the readability to the readers.Compared with the Chinese banks,HSBC use modal verbs as hedging to make the attitude modest through the text.With respect to the textual function,Chinese banks use the marked theme which makes the overview complicated,while HSBC adopts the unmarked theme and several types of thematic progression to make text coherent.The uniqueness of the thesis is to give the Chinese banks suggestions when composing overviews on the official website compared with the HSBC overview from the perspective of systemic functional grammar,which can add the readability as well as means of advertising strategy to reduce the cost on the advertisement and attract the reader’s attention.The thesis is structured into six parts.Chapter 1 presents the background and current situation of the Chinese state-owned banks and HSBC as well as the theory Systemic Functional Grammar.Chapter 2 provides literature review and theoretic framework to introduce the three metafunctions and the background of the three banks ABC,BOC and HSBC.Chapter 3 presents data collection and research methods.Chapter 4 is the research result.Three texts are made contrastive analysis to present similarities and differences.Based on the result,Chapter 5 discusses the features and puts forward suggestions to modify the overview.Chapter 6 concludes the research of the thesis and puts forward limitations and future research. |
