A Comparative Analysis Of Interpersonal Function In The Economic Texts Of Chinese And America Government Reports From Intercultural Perspective

As an official document of the year,the Report on the Government’s Work(RGW),whose main content is to sum up the work of the past year and the deployment of the task of the next year,attracts widespread attention and discussion at home and abroad.The State of the Union Address(SUA)in America has a similar function.The president of the United States has a parliamentary speech every year to review his work of last year and to make clear his proposals for the coming year,striving for the adoption of the parliamentary.This thesis takes the economic texts of RGW and SUA from 2006 to 2015 as analytic texts and builds an operational framework based on Halliday’s interpersonal function,Hall’s high-context and low-context and Hofstede’s value dimensions.It reveals the similarities and differences between them,analyzing the cultural factors.The author analyzes them from three dimensions including mood system,modality system and cultural factors.In terms of mood system,both Chinese economic texts and English economic texts mainly employ declarative mood.However,it should be noted that the mood in the economic texts of SUA is more various,as the interrogative mood and the imperative mood are obviously applied more than that in Chinese.The first personal pronouns take large proportion in the two economic texts of RGW and SUA.Due to the fact that non-subject sentences exist in Chinese,so that the number of the first person is far less than that in English.The second personal pronouns and the third personal pronouns are barely employed in the economic texts of RGW.As for modality system,Modal words are embodied in English and Chinese economic texts,which can be more acceptable for the hearers.In terms of modulation,English economic texts are rich,while there are few modulation words in Chinese economic texts.As for cultural factors,language can be taken as the carrier of culture;its cultural differences are reflected in three aspects.Firstly,Chinese belongs to the high-context language and its information is conveyed in an indirect way,while English belongs to the low-context language and its information is conveyed by a direct way;Secondly,the Chinese and English reflect different modes of thinking,Chinese thought pattern belongs to the pattern with integrity and generality,while American are tends to be logical and analytical.Thirdly,China is a collectivist country and its language has a strong feature of collectivism,while the United States is a country of individualism.Although the use of collective vocabulary appears in the economic text,it still reflects the tendency of individualism as a whole.To sum up,both of them have similarities and differences from the three perspectives above,which reflect the features of English and Chinese and the different cultural factors.The thesis will be helpful for us to research the texts of RGW and SUA.