Analysis Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Mongolian Love Song Lyrics

Nowadays, music is closely related to our daily life. One of the most popular forms of contemporary music is love songs. Song lyrics can be regarded as the special spoken texts written for the purpose of singing. Love song lyrics reflect one's feeling, emotion and sentiment and carry out interaction among three related groups of people; writers, singers and audiences. With this unique feature of song lyrics as texts, they need to be analyzed. However, few researches have been done on this area, especially in the language of minority group-Mongolian. And Halliday's interpersonal function is the function of interaction of people. This thesis takes Mongolian love song lyrics as the target of text analysis from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar. The present study applied an elaborate linguistic model to analyze the realization of interpersonal function in Mongolian love song lyrics so as to explore how the song lyrics, as a medium through the construal of interpersonal meaning of the language, smoothly carry out its interpersonal function to influence audience, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Therefore, thirty well-known Mongolian love songs will be selected to do a synchronic analysis. Statistical analyses are made to explore the interpersonal functions in love song lyrics. By analyzing the three main aspects of interpersonal function, namely, mood, modality and person, the author has found that declarative mood takes up a dominant position both in clauses and songs with interrogative and imperative mood following far behind. The analysis also shows that modal adjuncts and modal verbs are employed to indicate probability and usuality, but not inclination and obligation. And the first person singular pronounâ… is the most frequently used in the song lyrics with the second person pronoun you following behind. In this light, the research may promise some insights into the application of functional grammar as well as the Mongolian discourse research itself and help people to deepen their understanding of Mongolian people, culture, and values. As a first try to dig out the linguistic features of this unique discourse, the present work is just a tentative research. Because of the relatively few studies in this field, and the inadequacy and limitation of the author's knowledge and learning, it needs further research by scholars and interested professors in this field.