Sonya Chik

This is a follow-up study on linguistic strategies employed by corporations in organizing customer behavior through public discourse (see Chik, 2014). In this paper, instances of corporate enabling texts in Japanese and English are examined to identify the rhetorical strategies in construing knowledge and enacting command. More specifically, this paper examines the similarities and differences in the choice of lexicogrammatical resources that realize the rhetorical relations in company privacy policy, a regulating text that explains and regulates the handling of personal information in the commercial context. The system of RHETORICAL RELATIONS developed by Matthiessen (1995, 2002, 2015), a modified version of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST, see Mann and Thompson, 1987, 1988) is deployed to analyze the rhetorical relations that form the principle organization of the text. First, the sample texts are analyzed to identify a global rhetorical organization that characterizes privacy policy. Next, rhetorical relations that increase the reader’s inclination to accept the propositions and those that increase the reader’s readiness to comply with the proposals are scrutinized. Finally, lexicogramamtical resources that realize the rhetorical relations in Japanese and English privacy policies are compared and discussed.

This paper presents a comparative study of the different linguistic strategies employed by corporations to organise and control the actions of their customers through written corporate communication in Japanese, English and Chinese.  The role of language in business and corporate communication, particularly in persuasive texts such as promotional discourse has been well-researched (Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Cook, 1992; Dann, 1996; Fairclough, 1992, 2001, 2003). However, study on how corporation uses different languages to instruct, regulate and control customer behaviour remains under-explored. Grounded in systemic functional linguistic theory, this paper aims to identify how the customer is constructed and positioned lexicogrammatically in enabling text under commercial context in Japanese, English and Chinese.  The analysis showed that Japanese favours indirect commands expressed in a formal and distant manner to maintain the institutionalised relations between company and customer, while English and Chinese favours comparatively direct and neutral approach in regulating customer with minimal or no differentiation in hierarchical relationship between writer and addressee.  The differences between the three languages are observed in the distribution between mood type that realises command congruently or metaphorically, and degree of value and orientation in modality that reflects the speaker’s attitude, evaluation and degree of commitment to the proposition (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Teruya, 2007; Li, 2007).

Online reviews have attracted research interests across varying disciplines for practical reasons. In the domain of marketing, online customer reviews are an important source of data that is used to investigate the effect of word-of-mouth on product sales and brand perception (e.g. Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Chen & Xie, 2008). In linguistic research, online reviews have become common artefacts for genre analysis (e.g. Taboada, 2011; De Jong and Burgers, 2013) and sentiment analysis (e.g. Taboada, 2016). While the majority of the studies to date are English-centric, a growing body of multilingual research has emerged due to the rapid development of online services and review sites that cater for a global audience from different language communities. However, most multilingual or contrastive studies of online reviews are based on the comparison between English and other European languages (cf. Cenni & Goethals, 2017; Taboada et al., 2014).  This study aims to contribute to the body of work on multilingual text analysis of online reviews by investigating the cross-linguistic variation between English and other Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese. The broad research objective is to investigate whether different language communities construct evaluation differently in online book reviews, and if there are divergences, whether salient patterns can be identified and generalized to predict the characteristics of similar text type in the respective languages. 
A corpus-based study was conducted over 60 online book reviews on Murakami Haruki’s novel 1Q84 (20 in each language - English, Japanese and Chinese). The sample texts contain both “positive” and “critical” reviews as categorized according to Amazon.com’s product rating criteria and were randomly extracted from the customer review section (Amazon.com for English, Amazon.jp for Japanese and Amazon.cn for Chinese). Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory (Halliday, 1978) is chosen as the underpinning theoretical framework for its holistic approach to text in context and its proven appliability to register and genre analysis.  There are two parts to the present study. Part one is concerned with the generic structure of the online book reviews in terms of the generic stages in which the texts are organized at the macro level (cf. Taboada, 2011). Part two investigates the lexicogrammatical features that constitute the evaluative stage. The text is analyzed at the rank of clause and is examined for different types of modal assessment including evaluative lexical items and phrases, Mood and Modality; Conjunctions in logical sequencing of clause-complex, and Theme in overall textual development (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014 for the English system and Teruya, 2007 for the Japanese system). Commonalities and divergences in linguistic choices for constructing evaluation in English, Japanese and Chinese online book reviews are discussed and directions for future research are recommended.

References

Cenni, I., & Goethals, P. (2017). Negative hotel reviews on TripAdvisor: A cross-linguistic analysis. Discourse, Context & Media, 16, 22-30.
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De Jong, I. K., & Burgers, C. (2013). Do consumer critics write differently from professional critics? A genre analysis of online film reviews. Discourse, Context & Media, 2(2), 75-83.
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Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday's introduction to functional grammar (4th edition). London and New York: Routledge.
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Teruya, K. (2007). A systemic functional grammar of Japanese, two volumes. London: Continuum.

In this study, I report some preliminary findings of an ongoing research project that explores language use in different social contexts of situation from a cross-linguistic perspective. I have chosen a controversial yet pervasive social phenomenon, 'privacy', as the object of investigation to uncover how different languages create and shape social reality through written discourse (cf. Halliday, 1978; Hasan, 1984). The findings of this study are intended to address two broad research questions. First, what are the linguistic choices in constructing the social reality of privacy that are register-motivated? Second, what are the typological constraints that underpin those choices? Through this study, I hope to furnish a linguistic profile of privacy by providing a detailed description of language use in contexts of situation where privacy is discussed in public discourse in a multilingual environment. The sample data I used for this study contains instances of written texts that operate in socio-semiotic processes where privacy is regulated (legal terms and policies), argued (expert opinion) and reported (news report) in Japanese and English. The texts are analyzed 'from above' in terms of field, tenor and mode (see Halliday & Hasan, 1989); 'from below' in terms of lexicogrammar with a focus on the systems of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD and MODALITY (see

This chapter presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis that draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics theory to compare written corporate legal texts in a bilingual corpus (Japanese and English). A systemic functional approach enables a systematic explication of variation between two languages in the semantic and lexicogrammatical strata with reference to the context of situation in which the texts operate. The results of the analysis revealed that equivalence occurs in the higher rank, i.e. semantics, where both languages shared a generic structure of [Background] ^ [General Statement] ^ Description, while variation occurs at the lower rank, i.e. lexicogrammar, with divergences identified in terms of shifts within the experiential metafunction.