| In the wake of Internet technology evolution,many corporations have switched their preferences to corporate websites for advertising and providing information about their companies.The“About Us"(henceforth AU)section,serving as an obligatory part of the corporation website,profiles the company’ s business as well as its approach,unique strength,and relevant experience,which is an interesting and crucial promotional genre,yet it is under-researchedResponding to the importance of the“About Us" section,this study examines how corporations describe and portray themselves from a linguistic perspective.Focusing on the commonest example of genre-level analysis—“move analysis",this study,integrating both qualitative and quantitative approaches,conducts a corpus-based move analysis on 204 "About Us" texts published on the official website of Global 500 corporations in China and the United States.Following Biber-Connor-Upton Approach to move analysis,we first describe and compare the communicative moves of the sampled AUs,and then analyze the lexico-grammatical features of different moves based on Systemic Functional Grammar(henceforth SFG),highlighting ideational metafunction and interpersonal metafunctionIn terms of move analysis,17 move types are identified in the sampled AUs,and there is no obligatory move that appears in all the AUs.Moreover,it is further found that:i)The most frequent moves are Move Type 1 Providing an Overview and Move Type 2 Introducing the Leadership for both countries;ii)Being more flexible and diverse in move structure,US corporations(17)use more move types than their Chinese counterparts(16),and maintain a higher rate of occurrence in most moves(12 out of 17),and no fixed pattern is observed in American AUs in terms of move sequenceIn terms of lexico-grammatical features,it is found that:i)material process,declarative mood,the first personal pronoun "we" as a referent of the company itself,and the low and median modality are dominantly used in the sampled AUs,which shows that,with AUs as a typical institutional discourse,companies in both countries try to introduce themselves objectively and rationally;and ii)compared with US corporations,Chinese corporations tend to use mental process,imperative mood,low-value modality less frequently,but use the third personal pronoun "it" as a referent to themselves more often,which further confirms that US corporations tend to be more flexible and diverse in terms of linguistic features while their Chinese counterparts tend to be objective in introducing themselvesWith these findings,the current study provides important theoretical implications First,by describing and analyzing move structure and lexico-grammatical features of AU texts,this research has enriched our understanding about the special type of self-promotional discourse and contributes to business discourse and business communication studies in general,and on-line business discourse studies in particular Second,by comparing the AUs in American and Chinese corporations,it has added knowledge to cross-cultural business discourse and communication,and thus contributed to relevant literature.Third,it has extended the move analysis as well as genre analysis of business discourse by combining corpus-based move analysis with SFG,and has paved a new way for business discourse and communication studies.And finally,by using a software-supported approach and conducting quantitative metafunction analysis,it has promoted the usage of the quantitative approach in SFGAs to practical implications,this research guides companies to realize the importance of linguistic features,in particular lexico-grammatical features and move structure,embodied in AUs and other business discourses,and provides some insights for companies to better construct their AUs and other self-promotional discourses Especially,in the background of "going global",our findings are also enlightening for Chines corporations in the localization of international websites. |
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