Contrastive Analysis of Interpersonal Metafunction in Chinese and English TED Talks

Abstract

TED Talks are now used to spread knowledge among the people, and people have begun to pay more attention to interpersonal communication in a one-way manner. According to the theory of interpersonal function in Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper will compare the Chinese and English editions of TED Talks. The three progressive levels are the Mood system, the Modality system and the Appraisal system; they study the difference in attitude between the Subject and the Finite, the participation of interrogative and imperative structures, the graduation features of modalization and modulation, and the attitudinal presentation of affect, judgment and engagement resources. Based on the above statistics, English talk is more dependent on explicit grammatical markers and clear graduation scales; it has distinct boundaries for stance and shows a stronger contraction of dialogic space. Modal particles, subject ellipsis and contextual inference are used in Chinese speech to show social relationships, and they have a relatively high degree of stance fluidity and use more inclusive and softening expressions of engagement. The difference in the two languages for encoding interpersonal metafunctions is not that one is superior to the other; rather, they are different expressions of their respective linguistic systems and cultural norms under the same communicative goal.