A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In English Commercial Editorials

Halliday proposed the theory of systemic-functional grammar in the 1960s, which contributes a lot to various fields of linguistic study. In Functional Grammar, three meta-functions are employed to explore how meanings are created and understood. In functional grammar, language is believed to serve three functions:ideational, interpersonal and textual meta-functions. In addition to the function of expressing the speaker's experience and mental activities, language also possesses the functions of expressing the speaker's identity, position, attitude, motivation, deduction, judgment and evaluation. This function of language is called interpersonal function. Interpersonal meta-function means that language is used to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our points of view on things in the world, and to elicit theirs further. Besides, with economic globalization and frequent business exchange, diverse forms of economic are performed. Combined with the continuous improvement of media platforms and people's concerns with the importance of public opinion, editorials, especially English commercial editorials become more and more important.Interpersonal meaning has always been a focus for lots of scholars and linguists. Previous studies have focused on theoretical exploration. There are some empirical studies targeting English news or advertisement as the research objectives. As for the study of interpersonal meaning in English commercial editorials, it is still a relatively new approach and dimension. Therefore, in the present research, we focus on the three lexico-grammartical resources-mood, modality and pronoun system. From these three aspects, the purpose of the present research is to probe into the interpersonal meaning of English commercial editorial texts from the approach of systemic functional grammar. Research methods like illustration, quantitative and qualitative statistics are adopted to guarantee the validity of the analysis and results.This thesis mainly addresses three questions:1. How does the pronoun system distribute in the English commercial editorials? 2. What are the proportions in all parts of the temporal operators? 3. What is the tendentiousness of the model operator in the English commercial editorials?The corpus used in this research,30 samples in total, comes from print public authoritative European and the United States'commercial editorials in newspapers, magazines and internet. The thesis carries out descriptive analysis of mood, modality and pronoun system of the samples and explores their functions in expressing interpersonal meanings.The major findings are as follows:1. when the subject appears frequently with the third person, the writer can describe the fact with the identity of the observer, in a seemingly objective manner, and keep their distance from the incident and take a neutral stance.2. In commercial editorials, the past tense and present tense are used more frequently. The reason for focusing on the fact of past and present and for avoiding forecast future incidents is that the writer is trying to make their point of view objective.3. Modal operators which appear in the text are not frequent, but the low-value group and median group used frequently. Using less modal operator, that might avoid too be subjective, conversely and it will increase the objectivity. With the realization of the interpersonal meaning function, the editorial writers present their point of view more successfully. At the same time, the editorial writers also persuade and influence the reader in an objective and fair stance.However, this research is only a tentative study of interpersonal meaning in the English commercial editorials. There is inevitably limitation in the analysis, so more efforts are needed to make in the future research.