Exploration Of Mood System Of English Love Song Lyrics And Its Interpersonal Functions

This thesis takes English love song lyrics as the target of text analysis from the perspective of mood and its realization of interpersonal functions. Song lyrics texts have the quality of both oral and written text and can be regarded as oral text written for the purpose of singing. Among all kinds of songs, subject with love is probably the most common genre of song lyrics. Therefore this study focuses on love song lyrics, specifically English love song lyrics. Love song lyrics reflect one's feeling, emotion and sentiment and carry out the interaction among three related groups of people: writers, singers and audiences. And Halliday's interpersonal function is the function of interaction of people. People use language to express one's attitude, give judgments and influence others'behavior. Mood as a way of realizing interpersonal function is a great tool to analyze song texts. It provides insight into the interactions between addressers and audiences. The exploration of mood system and its interpersonal meaning is from two levels. At the syntactic level, song texts will be talked in terms of declarative, imperative and interrogative. At the lexical level, the frequency and percentage of Modal Operator, Mood Adjuncts and Comment Adjuncts will be analyzed. It is found that declarative mood takes up a dominant position both in clauses and in songs, with the imperative and interrogative mood following far behind. And the high frequency at lexical level occurs in the words of"still","never","always","can","will"and"can't". The tentative explanations to the findings are the cultural orientation of westerners. Western people are open, direct and explicit in communication. They tend to share feelings openly and directly express their emotion. Also they are more feeling-oriented to say what they intend to say. These all lead to the high frequency use of declarative mood in English love song lyrics. And highly frequent use of"still","always"and"will"is characterized by the moral value of perseverance of western people. They stick to their words, love and everything as long as they start to do. Because of the limitation of time, energy and the author's knowledge, it still has some limitations of the current study and need further research of professors.