| In Halliday’s concept of metafunction,a clause at the lexico-grammatical level is assumed to realize three strands of meanings at the semantic level.Interpersonally speaking,the clause is a meaning-making resource for social interaction in the verbal exchange,e.g.to exchange commodities,allocate interactive roles,and enact social relations between a speaker and his addressee.Systemic Functional Linguistics is designed to be an appliable linguistics.As to its application of discourse analysis,the interpersonal theory in SFL offers a means of exploring interpersonal meanings in a text through observing its lexico-grammatical selections and the patterns of these selections.Halliday’s theory of interpersonal metafunction mainly consists of the semantic system of SPEECH FUNCTION(including the system of modality,which construes the region of uncertainty that lies between the positive and negative poles)and the grammatical system of Mood that realizes it.The job of his interpersonal analysis can hence be divided into the following tasks: coding the clauses in terms of the mood selections,labelling their Speech Functions and modality features when necessary,analyzing a speaker’s patterns of congruent/metaphorical choice,and explaining these patterns in the context of situation.However,Halliday’s system of SPEECH FUNCTION at the semantic level is related only to one particular clause class,i.e.free clause,at the grammatical level,which drives the bound clause(either dependent or embedded)out of the interpersonal analysis because they do not actually select in the MOOD system.Matthiessen refers to the meanings realized by the free clauses as the Primary Speech Functions and those by the minor clauses as the Minor Speech Functions;however,the semantic units realized by the bound clauses are still not clear and are hence pitifully ignored in the practices of interpersonal analysis.The present research is designed for the purpose of amending and polishing the existing interpersonal theory in terms of its range of coverage and its power of interpretability.More semantic areas should be recognized at the level of semantics so as to match the various clause classes at the level of lexicogrammar.Meanwhile,a case study shall be conducted as an exemplar of the application of our newly-amended interpersonal framework.To be specific,three research questions are developed as follows:(i)what interpersonal meanings can be realized by the clauses of different classes from the SFL perspective?(ii)what semantic subsystems does each type of Speech Function consist of in its semantic network?(iii)how can our newly-amended framework of interpersonal theory be applied to the analysis of the authentic discourses in social communications?In order to answer these questions,we inherit SFL’s concept of stratification and adopt a top-down perspective in the theoretical construction but a bottom-up one in its applied study of discourse analysis.In theory,we identify three compulsory components in a verbal exchange at the contextual level,recognize six semantic areas along the cline of negotiability at the semantic level,and then relate these semantic areas to fourteen clause classes at the grammatical stratum.In practice,we select an episode of TV talk and regard its full transcription as the text for discourse analysis.Altogether 429 clauses uttered by the three interactants are annotated according to our system of CLAUSE CLASS and the revised version of MOOD system;the prominent patterns are analyzed by applying our semantic areas on negotiability and the semantic network of Primary Speech Functions at the semantic level;and the communicative purposes and the interactive tasks of these three interactants are discussed at the contextual level based on our semantic analyses.The major contributions of this dissertation can be summarized into four points as follows.(1)At the stratum of the context,three compulsory components are extracted from a verbal exchange: speaker,addressee,and commodity exchanged.As the basic unit of the communicative behavior,a discourse act is usually applied to give or demand a commodity exchanged at the center of the social interaction,or it may serve to attend or leave the negotiation at its periphery.(2)At the stratum of the semantics,the interpersonal meanings are therefore divided into two general regions: the Meanings Negotiated if the discourse acts take place at the center of social interaction and the Meanings Marginal if at the periphery.The former region is further divided into five segments along the cline of negotiability:Primary Speech Function(including Open Argument),Nearly-open Argument,Mid-way Argument,Nearly-closed Argument,and Closed Argument.The latter region is called Minor Speech Function because it does not involve a commodity exchanged and is hence beyond the cline.We therefore identify six semantic areas of interpersonal meaning,i.e.five segments on the cline and one area beyond it.Except the two terminal areas,this dissertation groups the other four areas(Nearly-open Argument,Mid-way Argument,Nearly-closed Argument,and Closed Argument)into Secondary Speech Function.Meanings in the first semantic area are often referred to as Primary Speech Functions and they can serve as the independent moves in the dialogic structure of discourse.Based on Halliday’s four-category classification(i.e.Offer,Command,Statement,Question),we append an intermediate form to both proposal(when commodity exchanged is goods-&-service)and proposition(when it is information)as the Complex Speech Functions in our definition,i.e.Suggestion and Confirmation.Following Hasan’s path,we propose a semantic network to each Primary Speech Function in order to depict some crucial differences in a verbal exchange.Different from her strategy,however,we use a unified frame in our theoretical constructions of all 6 semantic networks so that the similarities and contrasts can be explicitly revealed when two relevant types are compared.Each of our semantic networks consists of two simultaneous systems: within PROPERTY,we look at the differences about the actual quality or the potential transmission of the commodity exchanged;within PERSPECTIVE,we deal with the distinctions about the different comprehensions or attitudes from the both interactants towards the given Speech Function.(3)At the stratum of the lexicogrammar,the system of CLAUSE CLASS is established and fourteen clause classes are recognized,which are further sorted into six groups so as to be related to six semantic areas at the semantic level.For instance,the class of free clause is related to Primary Speech Function(including Open Argument)as its grammatical realization,the class of finite dependent clause to Nearly-open Argument,the class of finite embedded clause to Mid-way Argument,etc.Furthermore,a refined version of the MOOD system is offered in order to differentiate certain tiny distinctions of the grammatical form at the clause rank.(4)In practice,we provide a set of tools that are designed for the interpersonal discourse analysis at the rank of clause,which consists of The Measuring Tool of Negotiability(Table 3.7),The Measuring Tool of Proposal(Table 4.8),and The Measuring Tool of Proposition(Table 5.10).A case study is also supplied to exemplify how these tools out of our newly-amended framework can be applied in interpersonal analysis.As to the significance of this research,its findings can be applied to the interpersonal analysis in linguistic studies,the portrayal of a character in literature works,foreign language teaching in education,etc.This research is possibly helpful in the field of psychology or AI technology when a person’s discourse is coded. |
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