A Study On The Realization Of Interpersonal Meaning In English Business Conflictive Letters

In international trade, troubles and conflicts can not be avoided, so conflictive letters are usually chosen as the major media to negotiate, such as, complain letters, letters of claim, letters of adjustment and refusal letters. When conflict happens, gaining and losing interest may be touched upon, thus people are more sensitive to such types of letters. How to express one's attitude and point of view properly to achieve the communication purpose without affecting the harmonious relations between the two sides? The present thesis will make an analysis of the realization of interpersonal meaning in the 36 conflictive letters on the basis of Halliday's SFG and Martin's Appraisal theory and find out how the claimant and the defaulter achieve their respective communication purposes through mood, modality and evaluative vocabularies.Because of the wide scope of conflictive letters, the author just chooses letters of claim and letters of adjustment as the corpus in order to get a more accurate result. Through the respective analysis of the 18 letters of claim and 18 letters of adjustment, the author finds that it is feasible to adopt Halliday's SFG and Martin's Appraisal Theory to the analysis of the interpersonal meaning of conflictive letters. In the choice of mood, both the claimant and the defaulter choose declarative and imperative mood to transfer information, express desire or offer services, sometimes the claimant adopts interrogative mood to achieve the purpose of asking for information, while it is hardly employed by the defaulter; in the aspect of modality, the two sides prefer low and median value modals to express their willingness and obligation, as the claimant has the legal right to ask for compensation and he has a more determined attitude, then more high value modals are chosen by the claimant to achieve the function of exerting pressure; in the aspect of evaluative words, the claimant uses more positive words to state the fact and show his attitude, however, the defaulter adopts more active words to express his sincerity of solving the matter. The study not expands the field of SFG and Appraisal theory and it will provide some implications for business English teaching.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the purpose and significance of the study, and also introduces the methodology and organization of the thesis. Chapter two provides a survey on the previous study of interpersonal meaning and business letters. Chapter three gives a brief review of Systemic-Functional Grammar and Martin's Evaluation theory. Chapter four gives a detailed analysis of the realization of interpersonal meaning in letters of claim and letters of adjustment respectively. Chapter five comes to the conclusion of the thesis. It puts forward some findings and contributions of the study and also contains the limitations and suggestions for further study.