A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In English TV Interview From The Perspective Of Systemic-Functional Grammar

As television reached more and more homes all over the country, the talk show have gained great popularity, and emerged many famous talk show programs. The Tonight Show, first with Steve Allen in 1954 and eventually Johnny Carson, established the late-night genre that remains wildly popular today. A variety of daytime talk shows have covered a number of issues with very distinct methods of delivery. Serious, issue-oriented programs like Donahue, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and Charlie Rose have been important vehicles for the discussion of important social issues. TV talk shows have become powerful influences on the way adults, teens, and children think and interact. Therefore, in the past decades, this special type of talk has attracted the attention of a lot of conversation analysts, whose efforts have led to the accumulation of fruitful achievements in this field. However, up to now, few people have put much emphasis on it from the perspective of systemic functional grammar."We use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs."(Thompson, 2004: 30) The speakers use language to interact with listeners so as to establish and maintain social relations as well as describe the world around them. This function of language is called interpersonal meaning in Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG). Exploring the realization of the interpersonal meaning through the utterances of the host and the guests in the TV talk show is a practical method to reflect the social role of transmitting information of mass media. Based on the samples that are collected from the English TV talk show Larry King Live and Reliable Sources, the present study takes Halliday's SFG as the tool to analyze the interpersonal meaning in TV talk show. The research is made grammatical-lexically from the aspects of Mood and Modality systems. Followed by the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis and data-driven and theory-driven approach, the findings of the study are considerably credible.It is revealed that the host or guests adopt various linguistic patterns to interact with the others during the talk. To construct and develop the interactive relation, mood structures have been used typically and non-typically by the participants in the TV talk show; the careful choice of modal expressions serves to express the speaker's attitude and influence the hearer's attitude or his/her behavior during the talk show.Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar can be proved to be applicable for this type of genre analysis. The interpersonal meaning is integrated into the realization of mass media's social function of transmitting information to the public. It is expected that the study can throw light on the interpersonal meaning in the linguistic study of TV talk show as well as supply authentic data for discourse analysis. Key words:...