A Contrastive Study On The Interpersonal Meaning In English And Chinese Letters Of Trade Claims

With the tremendous growth in economic globalization,business activities develop prosperously.Business correspondences considered as a typical mean in business communication play a vital role in both domestic and international trading activities.During transactions,both seller and buyer should strictly comply with the contents of contract and fulfill their obligations.When any party can not abide the contract and even cause certain economic losses to the other party,then the affected party has the right to lodge claims on the one who should be responsible for the losses.Letters of claims regarded as an official letter offer a communicative way to solve trade disputes effectively.The main purpose of claim letters is to persuade the responsible party to solve problems positively rather than just blaming and complaining.Thus,it is necessary for the writers to use appropriate words or sentences to express attitude and standpoint so as to solve the conflicts perfectly.At present,the domestic and overseas scholars mainly analyze letters of claims through politeness strategies,stylistics and rhetoric,etc,while they do not pay enough attention to the contrastive study from the perspective of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar.Therefore,this paper tends to make a contrastive study on the English and Chinese letters of claims based on theoretical framework of the Systemic-Functional Grammar and tries to reveal the similarities and differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning,which may offer a new way to study the cross-cultural business communication.This study is conducted from three aspects:(1)How is interpersonal meaning realized in English letters of claims in terms of person system,mood system and modality system?(2)How is interpersonal meaning realized in Chinese letters of claims in terms of person system,mood system and modality system?(3)What are the similarities and differences of interpersonal meaning between English and Chinese letters of claims? The first chapter introduces the background,significance and the organization of this paper.Then the second part reviews the previous studies on the interpersonal meaning and letters of claims.In the third part,the theoretical framework is provided in details.Chapter four illustrates the research questions,research method and procedure of this thesis.The following body discusses how the interpersonal meaning is realized based on the Systemic-Functional Grammar and the similarities and differences between the English and Chinese sample letters.Finally,a summary of major findings and implications is provided.Moreover,the limitations of this research and suggestion for the future study are also illustrated.In this research,30 English letters of claims and 30 Chinese ones are selected from the published books as the corpus.Combined with quantitative and qualitative methods,this study proves that it is feasible to employ Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar to analyze the realization of interpersonal meaning in both English and Chinese.In choice of person pronouns,the first person pronouns are adopted most frequently in English letters of claims,while the second person pronouns are used mostly in Chinese ones.On the aspect of mood structure,the declarative mood structure takes up the dominant position both English and Chinese letters,which is mainly used to give information.However,the Chinese writers prefer to use more imperative mood than English ones,while the if-clause mood structure is used more frequently in English letters.In choice of modality,the writers of both sides prefer mood adjuncts to indicate the fact from an objective view.As for the mood operators,the median value operators are employed most frequently in English letters of claims while the operators of low value are used most in Chinese ones.These analytical findings have certain theoretical and practical significance.The present study not only widens the scope of the research of Systemic-Functional Grammar,but also provides certain reference value for the future study of letters of claims.On the other hand,it offers certain references for cross-cultural business communication.Businessmen may better understand the similarities and differences existing in Western and Chinese letters of claims.Thus,they can choose proper words and expressions to ensure the effective cross-cultural business communication.