An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In English Tour Guide Speeches

One of the most important functions of language is interpersonal function. Interpersonal meaning is a term drawn from Halliday's Systemic 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 other's opinions. The purpose of the present research is to probe into the interpersonal meaning in English tour guide speeches from the approach of Systemic-functional grammar. In this thesis, tour guide speeches refer to commentaries made by tour guides in informing the tourists of the related knowledge or information about the tour destination and stimulating the tourists' interests in sights. The author has participated in tour guide's training class organized by CITS (China International Travel Service), so obtained this valuable material.According to Halliday, the realization of interpersonal meaning is typically fulfilled by mood and modality; however, many other researchers prove that Halliday does not exhaust all the linguistic devices which carry the interpersonal meaning. That is to say, the theoretical framework of interpersonal meaning should be supplemented and the means to realize interpersonal meaning can be multiple. Appraisal system is a significant means to realize interpersonal meaning.The purpose of the thesis is to discuss linguistic characteristics of English tour guide speeches and discover how the tour guide speech attracts and intrigues the consumers by carrying out interpersonal meaning analysis in tour guide speeches from functional grammar approach. It also tries to prove that Systemic-Functional grammar put forward by Halliday is an effective methodology for conducting discourse analysis, which may broaden the relevant theoretic studies throughout the application in specific field. Apart from that, it is hoped that this uncertain analysis of linguistic realization of interpersonal meaning will be a helpful supplement to the studies on tour guide speeches; and meanwhile it will deepen the tourists'understanding of tour guide speeches and enable tourists to be better informed about how to express interpersonal meaning appropriately through lexical grammar in tour guide speeches so as to achieve the communicative goal successfully. Through the analysis and discussion, the author finds that functional grammar is applicable in the analysis of English tour guide speeches. Besides, there are some characteristics of tour guide speeches in the realization of interpersonal meaning:(1) many interrogative and imperative sentences are used in English tour guide speeches; (2) the majority of the sentences are declarative mood; (3) English tour guide speeches have the communicative functions of exclamation, that is, to express the tour guide's passion and show strong emotional response to something;(4) in terms of mood, the type of probability is the predominant; (5) simple present tense and simple future tense are popular in tour guide speeches;(6) as to the personal pronoun, in English the second personal pronoun is most frequently used, and has only one form you, while in Chinese there are two forms. People use''您"instead of'你"to show politeness, but in English people have to choose other forms of the personal pronoun to show politeness; (7) Appraisal in tour guide speeches can be realized by different lexical choices, that is, adjectives, adverbs and verbs with positive meaning. And English tour guide speeches emphasize on subjective effect and judgment, which is the result of the western cultural tendency in the language.