| The interpersonal meaning of language originates from the division of language threemeta-functions in Systemic Functional Grammar. Halliday, as a Systemic Functional linguist,holds the view that language has three meta-functions: ideational function, interpersonalfunction and textual function. The interpersonal function of language is that people uselanguage to communicate with others, to establish and to maintain relationships, to influenceothers’ behavior, to express their views toward the world and to change the world. Hallidaystudies interpersonal meaning mainly focusing on Mood, Modality and Personal Pronoun.Then Martin’s Appraisal Theory completes the theory from the semantic point of view. Basedon semantic meaning, Evaluation is divided into three aspects in the Appraisal Theory:Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation.Applying Systemic Functional Grammar Theory and Appraisal Theory as a theoreticalframework, using15popular medical English journal articles as samples, the author of thisthesis analyzes how interpersonal meaning is realized in popular medical English journal.Qualitative method and quantitative method are adopted for the data analysis in thisthesis. Based on Systemic Functional Grammar Theory and Martin’s Appraisal Theory,qualitative method is used to analyze Mood, Modality, Personal Pronouns, and Evaluation inthe process of the realization of interpersonal meaning. Quantitative method is used to make astatistical analysis of frequency and distribution of the above means in popular medicalEnglish journal.The findings in the research are the following: interpersonal meaning is realized by chiefmeans of Mood, Modality, Personal Pronouns as well as Evaluation in popular medicalEnglish journal in which Mood, Modality play prominent roles. In popular medical Englishjournal, authors use the declarative Mood to transfer information; authors use the imperativeMood to show their authority; authors use Modality to reduce the absoluteness of propositionso that the reader is easy to accept their views; authors use the first Personal Pronoun “we” tokeep a close distance with readers and to show their authority, the former is called “inclusivewe” which includes readers and the latter is called “exclusive we” which excludes readers;authors use the second Personal Pronoun to identify authors’ leading position and readers’ ledposition; authors use the third Personal Pronoun “it” to show the sharing information; authorsuse Evaluation to express their affects, to judge other people’s behavior, to appreciate theentity itself, to show resources of their sounds and present the Evaluation intensity.The significance of this study is twofold: theoretically, the combination of SystemicFunctional Grammar Theory and Appraisal Theory is used to explore the realization ofinterpersonal meaning, and then this combination makes the means of realizing interpersonal meaning various. Practically, the study provides a new perspective to the popular medicalEnglish teaching and studying. On the one hand, there are some implications for teachers; onthe other hand, it can help students to correctly comprehend the discourse and the writer’swriting standpoint in order to improve their comprehension ability. |
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