| Interpersonal meaning originates from the three metafunctions of language in systemic functional linguistics. It means that people use language to express their opinions and attitudes, expose social statuses, influence other's behaviors and establish social relationship.(Halliday: 1985,1994). Halliday analyzes interpersonal meaning mainly from the perspectives of mood, modality and key concerning giving or demanding goods and services and exchanging information. Following Halliday, the scope of interpersonal meaning have been enriched and extended by many linguists. Martin(2003) puts forward the appraisal theory and maintains that interpersonal meaning can be realized not only on the lexico-grammatical level but also by appraisal resources. By employing appraisal resources, the writer can express his attitude, judgment and appreciation, and establish the relations with the reader and in this way, interpersonal meaning is realized.With the economic development, business news reports are more and more indispensable to people's life. Compared to other sub-styles of news discourse, the journalist predicts business trends, and analyzes business phenomenon and situations when reporting professionally and objectively. In business news reports, the communicative sides are the journalist and the reader. The journalist tries to employ linguistic resources to influence the reader, to make his business opinions easily accepted, apart from providing objective information. Many interpersonal resources are embedded in business news reports.This thesis attempts to explore the realization of interpersonal meanings in English business news reports from the perspectives of mood system, modality system and appraisal theory based on the elaborated framework of Halliday's model of interpersonal meaning and Martin's appraisal theory. In the present study, 20 English business news reports are randomly selected as the samples from the front pages of the websites, http://www.ft.com/home/asia and http://www.nytimes.com/pages/ business of two newspapers, The Financial Times and The New York Times (financial section) from August 15, 2008 to September 15, 2008. Combining both qualitative and quantitative analytical methods, the author analyzes the functions of mood system, modality system and appraisal system in expressing interpersonal meanings It is found that declarative mood, taking up a predominant proportion, realizes the speech function of information-giving. Past and present tenses are widely adopted to show objectivity of business news reports. Apart from offering information, present tense gives the reader a sense of promptness, timelessness and immediacy. Future tense with a low proportion is used to predict business trends explicitly. Modal expressions are seldom seen in the samples and the journalist trends to use low and median values modal operators to express probability, by means of which his attitudes are easy to accept and a solid relationship with the reader is established. High values of obligation are applied in direct and indirect speeches to show the authority of speeches. Almost all kinds of appraisal resources are found in English business news reports, showing the opinions and attitudes toward business and conveying interpersonal meanings. Among the attitudinal resources, the journalist chooses appreciation resources to transfer his attitudes from a personal perspective to an institutional one so as to personalize the appraisal. Engagement resources occur more than others and heteroglossic voices are used to open up dialogic space to negotiate with the reader. By making use of graduation resources, the journalist tries to draw closer the psychological distances with the reader.It is feasible and rewarding to study interpersonal meanings in English business news reports from the perspective of functional linguistics. The author hopes that the present study can be instructive for English business news reports writing and teaching. |
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