On The Interpersonal Meaning Construction Of Philosophical Essays

Interpersonal meaning means that participants use language to interact with others,establish and maintain a certain interpersonal relationship with other participants and use language to influence or change others’ viewpoints,attitudes and behaviors.The thesis intends to analyze philosophical essays’ interpersonal meaning construction from the perspective of interpersonal function in Systemic Functional Grammar by adopting thirty Bacon’s philosophical essays as data.Throughin-depth analysis,the thesis finds that the interpersonal meaning of philosophical essays is mainly constructed by the three systems of modality,mood and cohesion.In the modality system,there are three ways to construct philosophical essays’ interpersonal meaning: using different types of modal verbs to interact with the reader,using different modal values of modal verbs to arouse readers’ resonance and using diverse modal adjuncts to influence readers’ attitudes and behaviors.The interpersonal meaning of philosophical essays constructed by mood system is mainly through mood structure and mood types.Specifically,there are two ways.Firstly,the author provides the objective proposition for readers by using the third person as Subject and simple present tenseas Finite operator;secondly,the writer exchanges feelings with readers,offers them practicaladvice and asksfor their feedback with implicit persuasion through declarative,imperative and interrogative mood respectively.And the cohesion system constructs interpersonal meaning mainly through three ways including grammatical cohesion,lexical cohesion,rhetorical devices and inference.Grammatically,conditionals,long sentences,attributive clauses,forceful quotations and endings are used to satisfy readers’ presuppositional needs for essays’ logicality,richness and philosophy.Lexically,repetitions,synonyms and antonyms are used to make topics more prominent and make essays more cohesive.Rhetorically and analogically,similes,metaphors and analogy are used to make essays more vivid,fascinating,understandable,cohesive and sensuous for enhancing readers’ acceptance.The systems of modality,mood and cohesionfrom different levelsexpress the author’s views and attitudes toward the world,making philosophical essays boast the functions of instruction,objectification,persuasion and aesthetics,which can affect the readers’ ideas and behaviors more effectively and establish a special interpersonal relationship with readers.Therefore,the study of philosophical essays’ interpersonal meaning construction plays a critical role in revealing the communicative intention and enhancing readers’ understanding of the original texts.The thesis not onlyexplores the philosophical essays from a new perspective and enriches research scope of interpersonal meaning,but also provides a new perspective and a new method for philosophical essays’ appreciation and a certain reference for the philosophical essays’ teaching.