Interpersonal Meaning In The Discourse Of Job Advertisements

The present thesis aims to investigate the realization of interpersonal meaning in the discourse of job advertisements from the perspective of systemic functional grammar. Job advertisements as a sub-category of advertisements belong to the persuasive genre. One function of job advertisements is to establish a good relationship between the recruiter and the potential applicants, which is realized by the resource for interpersonal meaning. Interpersonal meaning originates from three metafunctions of language in systemic functional grammar and it is concerned with the strand of meaning produced when we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs (Halliday, 1994). According to Halliday the mood and modality systems are the basic means to realize interpersonal meaning lexico-grammatically in the clause. Based on Halliday's model of interpersonal meaning, other scholars (Martin, 1992; Thompson, 2000; Li Zhanzi, 2002) further enrich or extend the scope of interpersonal meaning. The researcher makes a critical view of the previous studies of interpersonal meaning and analyzes the realization of interpersonal meaning from four aspects: mood, modality, person system and evaluation in the discourse of job advertisements.In this present research, 50 texts of job advertisements are collected from www.monster.com. a special recruiting website. The researcher carries out descriptive analysis in terms of mood, modality, person and evaluation based on the corpus, and then analyzes the distribution and frequencies of modal expressions, pronouns and some evaluative devices by using WordSmith 3.0 version, a suite of lexical analysis tools.In the present research mood, modality, person system and evaluation are studied in detail to show how they are employed in the discourse of job advertisement to realize interpersonal meaning. It is found that in the discourse of job advertisements...