A Contrastive Analysis Of English Profiles Between Foreign And Chinese Companies From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

With the increase of economic globalization and the across-cultural business cooperation,the role company profiles play in economic exchanges is increasingly significant.However,literature review finds that many of the earlier researches on company introductions focus on translation,genre and stylistic fields with few studies on company profiles from the respective of Appraisal Theory developed from SFL(Systemic Functional Linguistics),which has become a new lexico-grammatical framework employed to explore how writers or speakers apply language to express attitudes towards things,and how to coordinate interpersonal relationships with readers or audiences.Chinese company profiles(hereafter CCPs)and foreign company profiles(hereafter FCPs)contain many attitudinal and evaluative expressions that are related to judgements on products.Therefore,Appraisal Theory is an applicable framework for analyzing evaluative meanings in CCPs and FCPs.Within this research background,this thesis investigates the distribution and realization of three system resources between CCPs and FCPs,taking qualitative and quantitative methods based on the appraisal framework and attempts to reveal reasons for the similarities and differences.The thesis hopes to help readers to better understand company profiles and further promote intercultural communication and cooperation among enterprises.The research data are collected from 2019 Fortune Global 500,including 100 pieces of Chinese and foreign company profiles with 50 pieces in each.With the help of the UAM corpus tool and SPSS statistical analysis tool,all profile texts are categorized,manually annotated and then examined.The major findings are concluded as follows:Firstly,in general,Chinese and foreign company profiles employ many appraisal resources,among which Attitude and Graduation resources hold a higher proportion and Engagement resources are fewer,which shows that company writers tend to express emotions and align putative readers by using lots of appraisal resources.Secondly,in terms of Attitude system,Judgement and Appreciate resources account for large proportion and positive emotions are more preferred in two corpora because company profiles perform the primary function of describing products and establishing images.However,the contrastive analysis discovers that CCPs apply more Appreciation resources,whereas FCPs prefer to utilize Affect resources to express feelings.The different value orientations determine that Chinese businesses implicitly convey emotions by assessing products,while foreign companies explicitly express their attitudes.Thirdly,the Engagement and Graduation resources are scarce in both CCPs and FCPs.The reason is that as a type of business discourse,the company profile requires writers to give opinions directly and consider less other stances.Nevertheless,FCPs employ more diversified Engagement resources than CCPs,which indicates that foreign firms emphasize respect for various views and freedom of speech.In the distribution of Graduation resources,Force resources dominate CCPs,while Focus resources are favored in FCPs.The differences are down to different company attributes with Chinese companies being state-owned and foreign companies privately-owned.The up-scaling Force resources in CCPs show business strength,while Focus resources in FCPs attract customers' attention directly and accurately.Finally,though Chinese and foreign enterprises tend to use specific words in profiles,the realization in FCPs is more flexible.The reasons why appraisal resources are distributed differently can be summarized as cultural context,value orientation and nature of company.