The Interpersonal Meanings Of College Application Rejection Letters

Interpersonal meaning, as one of the three meanings in systemic function grammar, refers to that we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain certain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs. Halliday views that interpersonal meaning is mainly realized by mood, modality and key. He points out that person system realizes interpersonal meaning as well.College application rejection letters, as a kind of rejection letters, involve the face-threatening speech act of refusal, so they express significant interpersonal meanings. These letters convey the information of rejection, and at the same time deals with the addresser-addressee relationship.The study selects from the Internet 30 e-mail college application rejection letters written to international applicants, analyzes their contextual configuration, and explores their interpersonal meanings in terms of mood, modality and person systems by adopting both qualitative and quantitative method. The major findings are:(1) the writer dominates the interaction and keeps formal, impersonal, authoritative and objective; (2) he/she shows sincerity and respect to the reader, considers the reader's face and reduces the hurt to the reader by being less direct; (3) sometimes he/she shifts the responsibility of the rejection to the reader and conveys the rejection directly. These results are not contradictory, and are decided by the tenor and the function of the letters.