A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Narrative Country Music Lyrics

Country music, as a branch of American popular music, is loved, sung and appreciated by audience in America and other parts of the world. Narrative country music lyrics (NCMLs) tell stories to establish a good interactive relationship with the audience, to evoke their feelings, and to influence their views on things. NCMLs embody rich interpersonal meanings which are important in highlighting the themes of songs and in songwriter's diction and organization of sentences and texts.The term "interpersonal meaning" originates from the classification of language metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The theory of interpersonal metafunction is concerned with how people use language to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships with others, to influence other people's behavior, to express viewpoint on things and to elicit or change that of others (Thompson, 2000:28). The interpersonal meaning is defined by Eggins (2004:11) as "a strand of meaning running throughout the text which expresses the writer's role relationship with the reader and the writer's attitude towards the subject matter". Halliday (2000) regards mood and modality as the major components of interpersonal meaning. However, the prosodic feature of interpersonal meaning indicates that various resources can contribute to its realization. Thompson (2000) discusses interpersonal meaning from two major aspects: the interactive and the personal. Martin and White (2000, 2005) establish Appraisal theory to explain speaker's attitude in the discourse, which enriches the theory of interpersonal metafunction. Adopting Thompson's framework while combining the attitude system in Martin and White's Appraisal theory, this thesis describes and explains the interpersonal meanings realized in six samples of NCMLs from the perspectives of mood, person, modality and attitude.Based on the lives of ordinary people, NCMLs express people's shared feelings, reflect people's ideologies, and reveal life philosophies. In mood system, the interpersonal meaning is manifested through the extensive use of declaratives which carry the story and the writer's viewpoints. This characteristic shows that during this non-face-to-face communication, the narrator is the active controller who decides the contents of communication and tries to involve the audience in the interaction. In person system, through different personal pronouns, the narrator adjusts the relationship with the audience, creating a sense of dialogue in the discourse and shortening the distance with them. The modality system of NCMLs reflects the narrator's feelings and opinions, guiding the audience to judge an event or a person positively or negatively. The personal feelings and judgements of behaviors or things are further realized in the attitude system. With different types of attitude, the narrator attempts to construct or share certain values with the audience.This thesis applies the theories of interpersonal meaning in SFL to analyze NCMLs. It is hoped that it can provide a new perspective for studying the interpersonal meaning realized in song lyrics, broaden the research scope of interpersonal meaning, and help people to further their understanding of American society, culture, and values. As there are relatively few studies in this field, the author hopes to draw more attention from researchers to this particular type of discourse, and expects that more in-depth research can be conducted in this field.