An Interpretation Of Interpersonal Meanings In Business Open Letters

Language is used by people in daily life not only to describe the world around them but also to communicate with each other to establish, maintain proper relations among them and express their own viewpoints on things in the world. Systemic-functional linguistics names such function as the interpersonal meaning of language. Halliday proposes a framework for exploring the interpersonal meaning and later his student Thompson expands Halliday’s framework to make it more applicable to the analysis of both written and oral discourse. Based on the expanded framework of Thompson, the present thesis intends to interpret how interpersonal meanings are realized in business open letters from four dimensions, namely, person system, mood system, modality system and evaluation system.Business letters have been the research focus for a long time, however, as a sub-category of business letters, business open letters are rarely researched. Written to the public readers, business open letter is gradually becoming an important tool for companies to facilitate effective communication with the public. The final goal of writing business open letters is to maintain and establish the good image of the company through effective language interaction with readers. This indicates that business open letters can include rich information as well as abundant interpersonal meanings. Thus, it is probable for us to explore how interpersonal meanings are realized through linguistic devices in business open letters.Business open letters analyzed in the present research are mostly selected from famous international companies’ homepage. In order to have an overall and comprehensive understanding of business open letters, nine letters classified into three categories according to their writing purposes, will be adopted as the cases for the present study. A qualitative and quantitative description of these four aspects in business open letters will be presented to reveal how interpersonal meanings are realized through the linguistic devices. The findings are as follows:Firstly, in person system, the combination of first and second pronouns creates an atmosphere of face-to-face communication thus the readers can get involved into the interaction. Meanwhile, the dominant use of first person pronouns we, us, our has made great contributions to the establishment of the company image of solidarity and sincerity.Secondly, in mood system, declaratives are used in high frequency, which indicates that in business open letters giving information is the main task of the writer and the potential readers are regarded as the information receivers. The status of the two sides in terms of information is not equal. Interrogatives and imperatives are rarely used to ask for information or command the readers to do something by the writer. The writers bear more responsibility in providing information. The unequal status for writers and readers in providing information can be interpreted as a good way for companies to show their responsibility and consideration.Thirdly, in modality system, writers of business open letters use modal verbs, modal adjuncts and metaphors of modality as modal expressions. They tend to use implicit modal expressions such as modal verbs and modal adjuncts to express their attitude politely. Meanwhile, large numbers of modal expressions are used to indicate probability and inclination in business open letters, implying that the writers of business open letters want to win trust from readers and establish a good company image of responsibility.Fourthly, through evaluation system, the writer applies some linguistic devices with positive emotional meanings to describe their products and services as well as uses more information sources to make the expressions more convincing, hoping to leave a good impression to the readers and maintaining good relations with them.The present study is a tentative analysis on the realization of interpersonal meanings in business open letters. The author aims to present the realization of interpersonal meaning from multiple perspectives in business open letters hoping that the analysis can help people use business open letter in an effective way to interact with people, deal with public relations and maintain a good company image.