A Functional Analysis Of Interpersonal Meanings In Business Letters Of Establishing Trade Relationships

Along with the rapid development of economy in China, great changes have been witnessed in almost all areas. More and more Chinese companies are opening their arms to welcome the global challenges and getting ready to build relationships with the foreigners. Business correspondences are of great help and importance. Many researchers have paid some attention to this special genre, especially to sales letters, which are understandable, in that selling is primarily important for a company. However, letters of establishing trade relationships haven't drawn due attention. Letters of this sort are used to establish relationship between two companies and communicate in a long time."One of the main purposes of communication is to interact with other people: to establish and maintain appropriate social links with them"(Thompson 2000:38), that is to say the interpersonal function of language tells other people things for a certain purpose indirectly, either to influence their attitude or behavior, or to provide information that we know but they do not have, or to explain our own attitudes or opinions, or get them to provide us with information, and so on so forth. Letters of establishing trade relationships are playing a special role and serving specific interpersonal functions.In this study, the author tried to explore the linguistic characteristics and applied a combined framework of Halliday's interpersonal model and Martin's evaluation theory to analyze the interpersonal meanings from the perspective of systemic-functional grammar and illustrate how interpersonal meanings are realized through its special person system, mood, modality and evaluation in this sort of discourse. 36 business letters of establishing trade relationships that have been proved to be helpful in business were collected from some course books, Internet, and some companies to make sure of their validity. In order to make her analysis complete and exhausting, the author adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods, describing the linguistic characteristics, and working on some statistics. Through the analysis, some findings are as follows: (1) The first and second person pronouns make the letters appear to be as interactive as face-to-face communication; the writer tends to adopt plural forms to represent the whole company so that a collective image reveals; the writer easily takes the"You-attitude"to show respect to the reader; (2) mood structures have been used non-typically by the writer to facilitate the interaction and negotiation with the potential consumers/readers; the writer would like to take an explicit subjective one to show his\her sincerity and impress the reader. (3) The modality system is mainly realized by the modal auxiliaries of different values to express different attitudes such as confidence, willingness. (4) Evaluation system expresses the writer's attitude, feelings, judgments etc., which enhances the interaction and negotiation with the reader. Under the background of globalization, this study is absolutely meaningful.Theoretically speaking, the study of the interpersonal functions of letters of establishing trading relationships may shed light on the development of discourse analysis; practically speaking, the present study is of immediate significance. Business activities are booming, a well-written correspondence of establishing trade relationships can help the company build and keep the relationship and benefits both companies. Besides, it gives some implications to the teaching of business correspondences.