A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And American Job Advertisements From A Cross-cultural Perspective

One of the important tasks of interpersonal meaning is to establish and maintain social relations.Job advertisement,as a special discourse,plays an important role in the contemporary society.The main purpose of recruiters is to establish a good relationship with job hunters so that they can persuade the readers to take an action on applying for the vacant positions and ultimately decide who is the right person for the job.What's more,interpersonal meaning will be expressed through content and discourse structure of job advertisements.This thesis is based on the interpersonal meaning of Halliday's functional grammar and it will study the features of Chinese and American job advertisements.60 job advertisements including 30 in Chinese and 30 in English have been collected in 2016 global fortune 500 companies from two influential recruitment websites: www.zhaopin.com in China and www.careerbuilder.com in America respectively.Through a detailed analysis of the mood,modality,pronoun and tense systems,the thesis will analyze how job advertisement achieves its interpersonal meaning at the lexical-grammatical level and calculate its distribution and frequency.However,it's meaningless to learn languages without considering their cultures.Language is the carrier of culture.Therefore,this thesis attempts to analyze cultural differences between the two kinds of languages.At the same time,the author will give the explanation of why they have different language forms between Chinese and American job advertisements.The brief conclusions are summarized as follows: firstly,from Hall's cultural context point of view,American culture is the low context culture.In the mood system,there are various mood structures in it.The interrogative and exclamative sentences are often used in American job advertisements,while they are less used in Chinese job advertisements.Secondly,from the angle of Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck's time orientation,China is a past oriented culture.In the tense system,the frequency of past tense in the Chinese job advertisements is very high.On the contrary,in American job advertisements,the number of future tense is higher than Chinese ones.Moreover,Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory has a significant impact on behavior in all cultures.In this respect,we can analyze that Chinese culture belongs to high power distance culture,while American culture belongs to low power distance culture.Based on the analysis of pronoun system,more pronouns are used in American job advertisements.What' more,value dimensions can also be divided into collectivism and individualism.They can be reflected through modality system.In American job advertisements,more median modal operators are used.To sum up,the purpose of this thesis is to make a comparative analysis of cultural factors between China and America.Furthermore,we can see that different cultures can reflect different forms of language expression in Chinese and American job advertisements.