ted stakeholders. Moreover, the thesis examines whether chairman’s statement in English and Chinese will be written in different ways. As the economy and technology development of China, many Chinese companies attempt to be listed in American stock market. But the way the chairman’s statement written will influence the image that companies try to build. The author tries to give Chinese companies guidelines on the writing of chairman’s statements. Last but not least, the author attempts to give some guidance for potential investors to make a decision. The chairman statement is a good step for potential investors to make a further decision. However, readers of the chairman statement have to recognize that the statement is written in a way to put the company’s operation in the best possible light. Investors will take the information in the chairman statement with a grain of salt. The author endeavors to give readers of chairman statement some hints.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
Many studies have been conducted in the field of chairman statements of annual reports and the field of interpersonal meaning by adopting appraisal theory. But few of them combine the two fields together. In this chapter, the author reviews the previous studies on the above-mentioned fields.
2.1 Previous Studies on Interpersonal Meaning
According to Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics, language is not only regarded as the plain text but with the purpose to convey information or meaning (Yin 2009). The term “interpersonal” is firstly raised by Halliday in 1968. From that time, Halliday has regarded that language has specific functions besides the language itself. From his early studies about functional grammar, he refers to the “functional components” of language, as the actual use of language to achieve our purposes. Halliday holds that the grammatical structure a person chooses determines the function of the language. Then he refers these functions to meta-functions in his functional grammar, namely, the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual in the year of 1970. Halliday once advocated that interpersonal meaning was a way of act through the interaction between the addresser and the addressee with communication in terms of language. To be more specific, the interpersonal meaning of language means relation between language and society, which reflects the role of each person and their relationship. So through interpersonal meaning in both oral and written communication, the reader or listener’s attitude is influenced by the writer or speaker.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Appraisal Theo
