Interpersonal Function Of Passive Voice In Natural Disaster News Texts

This research attempts to analyze the interpersonal meaning of passive voice in nature disaster news texts from the perspective of Systemic-Functional Grammar. Interpersonal function is one of the language functions proposed by Halliday, and it means that language can also express the speakers'identity, status, attitude and motivation in addition to delivering message. Through this function, the speaker allows himself to participate in specific context to show his attitude and to influence others'attitude and behavior. Its lexical resource includes mood, modality, intonation, emphasis and appraisal. Interpersonal meaning and interpersonal function are two concepts which are exchangeable. Interpersonal function is the start points of this paper, and its main idea is displayed in Halliday's works entitled An Introduction to Functional Grammar published in 1985 and 1994. In foreign researches, Eggins and Slade are the pioneers using Systemic-Functional Grammar to study the interpersonal meaning in the speeches. Halliday (1994) argued that interpersonal meaning is mainly realized through mood and modality systems. J. R. Martin, who is the guarder and developer of Halliday's thought, has also contributed a lot to interpersonal meaning. In 1990s, the theoretical framework of appraisal system was established preliminarily. Later Martin and P. White jointly built appraisal system and created appraisal system .theory in 2000. According to Martin, his definition of appraisal is "something related to appraisal, that is the various attitude involved in the negotiation, the emotional intensity and all kinds of means expressing values and alliance readers, consisting of three sub-systems of attitude, engagement and gradation. Since then, systematic-functional linguistics entered a new era. Domestic researches on systematic-functional linguistics started in 1970s. In 1980s, there were already many dissertations published. Hu Zhuanglin made the greatest contribution to functional grammar. In 1997, Hu Zhuanglin and Xu Kerong published dissertations on Language Teaching and Research, in which they introduced systematic-functional linguistics to the domestic readers. In 1984, Professor Hu Zhuanglin contributed an article to Foreign Language Teaching and Research to introduce Halliday's language views and systematic-functional linguistics comprehensively. His book General Introduction to Systematic-Functional Grammar (1989) gives systematic introduction to functional grammar.The research object in this paper is the passive voice in English. As a common and complicated language phenomenon, passive voice has always been the research topic of linguistics and grammarians. Many famous scholars both at home and abroad have conducted professional research on passive voice, for example, Fischer (1999) and Palmer (1974) studied passive voice from originality and functional perspectives. Domestic scholars like Yang Qiaoshi(2003), Wang Junhua(2005), and Wang Xiaojun (2006) etc. gave relative detailed analysis on the textual function of passive voice. Fang Yuanyuan and Wang Wenbin(2004), Du Juan(2007) discussed the information focus of passive voice. However, there are few researches on the interpersonal function of passive voice at present. Many scholars think that active voice expresses exactly the same meaning with the corresponding passive voice, including the school of transformational-generative grammar represented by Chomsky, and many scholars of systematic-functional grammar (Hu Zhuanglin at al.2005:100) all argued that the ideational functional and interpersonal function expressed by active voice and the corresponding passive voice are the same, the only difference lies in conversation focuses are varied when analyzing from textual function.After analyzing the above research, although many foreign and domestic scholars have conducted researches on interpersonal meaning from many visual angles, there are only a small number of researches on the interpersonal meaning of passive voice, and even smaller number of researchers on the interpersonal meaning of passive voice based on specific texts. It is suggested in this paper that in addition to the distinct textual function, passive voice also shows great interpersonal function, and it is a representation of interpersonal meaning. When the actor is taken as the adjunct or to be omitted intentionally, the interpersonal meaning expressed by passive voice is rich. The questions to be discussed in this paper include the following three:(1) Why does passive voice have interpersonal function?(2) What kind of interpersonal meaning does passive voice express?(3) What enlightenment will the researches on interpersonal function of passive voice bring to EFL teaching?The corpus selected in this paper are 30 pieces of news on natural disasters. After stepping in the 21st century, the whole world is full of danger and risks. Accompanying with the social transformation and economic soaring, all kinds of severe accidents (including natural calamities, accidents on public health and social security etc) appear in succession. Disaster news means the reports on the events bringing huge calamities to human beings and it is one component of news about unexpected incidents. Disaster news can be divided into natural and social calamities. Natural calamities are those severe incidents and disasters brought by force majeure or non-artificial reasons, such as earthquake, hurricane, flood, and volcano eruption, while social calamities mean the major criminal accidents or incidents out of negligence caused by all kinds of artificial reasons or social conflicts, such as terrorist attacks, war, perils of the sea, air crash, traffic incidents, bridge collapse, building collapse, mine fire damp explosion and so on. The western media are always attaching great importance to calamitous news, and calamities are even regarded as the festival of the foreign journalists. American Professor of journalism Doctor Bill Bernie argued that "for the news media, the most valuable news will be traffic accidents, flood, fire, earthquake, murdering, warm industrial disputes, death and injuries." Taking an overview on the past awarded news works with Pulitzer Prize, we can easily find that calamitous news occupy a large proportion. This paper takes the natural calamitous news as the corpus to study the interpersonal function of passive voice and how such interpersonal function is realized.Particularly in recent years, with the deterioration of environment and the destruction of natural disasters, earthquake happened from Wenchuan to Yushu in succession. The Tsunami in Indonesia and the volcano eruption in Iceland all bring people huge psychological and physiologic hurt. When the news media report such severe natural calamities, the publics'attention is also gathered on relevant news. As a branch of news, natural calamitous news also has the common features with other news. Passive voice is one of the most important language phenomena in English news, and is widely used in English news. Natural calamitous news offers rich corpuses to researches on passive voice, allows people to pay attention to the news and the language phenomenon simultaneously, and reaches an effect of killing two birds with one stone.Having made an Interpersonal meaning analysis of the 30 natural disaster news with both qualitative and quantitative approaches, some tentative research findings have been worked out in the study:(1) In addition to obvious textual function, passive voice also has great interpersonal function. When the actor serves as adjunct in the sentence or is omitted intentionally, then the passive voice displays relative richer interpersonal meanings.(2) The interpersonal function of passive voice can be displayed in three perspectives:firstly, displayed by the author's choice of voice; secondly, displayed by the situation when the actor is omitted intentionally; thirdly, displayed in the changing process of action.(3) This paper creates a small corpus by using 30 pieces of news related to natural disasters. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the interpersonal function of passive voice in natural disaster news is shown. Passive voice shows five interpersonal functions in natural disaster news:to arouse the readers'attention, to focus on the topic, to get rid of responsibilities, to show objectiveness, to show politeness and respect to the action receiver.Theoretically, taking the three functions of systematical-functional linguistics, particularly the interpersonal function as the theoretical foundation and regarding the five usages of passive voice summarized by Jesperson (1933) as the basis, this paper analyzes the interpersonal meaning displayed by passive voice. All these have further combined the researches on passive voice with that on text and discourse, which is different from the previous separate grammatical research and exhibits the pragmatic value of passive voice. The practical implications of this paper displays in two perspectives: implications for the readers and enlightenments to EFL teaching. Thus the research also offers more effective thread and method for the readers of news, allowing the readers to understand the reports'intention and the true information delivering to them in addition to know about the time, place and situation of the disasters.This research also has some directive meaning to EFL teaching. On one hand, EFL learners'understanding on language functions can be reinforced, which can well cultivate the learners'ability in discourse analysis and appreciation, which are mainly shown in reading comprehension and listening comprehension. On the other hand, EFL learners' understanding of the relationship between the language form and the language function can be improved, which will help them to choose more appropriate language form in expressing specific language functions, hence the learners'ability in language application, which is mainly displayed in spoken English and written English can be enhanced.The structure of passive voice is not complicated at all. Due to its difference in structure with active voice, some passive voice sentences are qualified to contain interpersonal meaning. Some sentences of passive voice place the receiver in the subject place, making the actor become the adjunct and emphasizing the importance of the receiver, so that the author is able to delivery his attitude and intention, and all kinds of communicative goals are reached; other sentences of passive voice may intentionally omit the actor in order to express the authors'attitude and intention so as to reach all kinds of textual goals. Understanding of passive voice is closely related to context. Different contexts can show different interpersonal meanings. The most frequent-seen manner is to deliver the author's attitude and intention through involvement and negotiation, finally reaching the interpersonal goals.