A Tentative Functional Approach To Interpersonal Meanings In Sales Correspondence

Interpersonal meaning was first elaborated by Halliday in 1960s, one component of the three meanings in functional grammar. It refers to how we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoints on things in the world, and to elicit or change others'opinions. In Halliday's view, interpersonal meaning is typically realized by Mood, modality and key, which tend to be scattered prosodically throughout the unit. Actually the theoretical framework of interpersonal meaning is supplemented by the fact that the means of realizing interpersonal meaning can be multiple. Besides, the means of realizing interpersonal meaning may be different for different genres. Therefore, the analysis of linguistic devices realizing interpersonal meaning is not necessarily confined to the scope defined by Halliday. The present study mainly focuses on how interpersonal meanings in sales correspondence can be realized through linguistic devices. Sales correspondence, as a sub-category of business correspondence, functions as conveying the information of goods and services to the prospective customers for the purpose of persuading them to purchase certain commodity being promoted. Therefore the language in sales correspondence has strong 'persuasive power', which can stimulate the readers'emotion and influence their future actions. For many years sales correspondence has been studied by researchers of various fields from different perspectives, focusing on how to attract the consumers'attention and how to persuade them to take actions, but surprisingly few studies have been undertaken from linguistic perspective. In the process of sorting out the previous studies on sales correspondence, the present thesis gains a new angle to study it: interpersonal meaning, for the reason that any successful sales correspondence should depend upon the good relationship between participants. Thus the present study links interpersonal meaning and sales correspondence with the register theory in an attempt to reveal what linguistic devices realize interpersonal meanings and how interpersonal meanings are realized in two kinds of sales...