Interpersonal Meaning Of Genderlect Differences

Interpersonal meaning, also called interpersonal metafunction, is drawn from Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. It refers to the interpersonal, changeable and negotiable aspects of language in use. That means language can be used not only to exchange information but to establish and maintain social relations, to show the speaker's status, attitude, motivation, judgement and evaluation, etc. This is interpersonal metafunction of language. Interpersonal meaning can be realized through three ways:mood, modality and key. Mood is the system to establish and maintain roles and role relationships between addresser and addressee. Appraisal theory, proposed by Martin, is evolved within the general theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, which is the further study of interpersonal meaning on the lexical level of discourse semantics. The thesis will mainly discuss interpersonal meaning of genderlect differences in the choices of mood types and appraisal resources by men and women. The discussed mood types in the thesis includes exclamative, imperative, yes-no interrogative and exclamations in minor clause. As for the appraisal resources, resources of graduation and engagement are involved. Study shows that men and women choose different mood types to express their personal feelings, to command, to encode advice and to evaluate. It is also found that usually men and women use the same clause structure to carry different appraisal meaning. However, there are not so obvious differences in the choices of appraisal resources by men and women.Study shows that genderlect differences are based on social factors, such as the influence of power relation, interpersonal relationship, social norms and conventions, education and family background, and personal view of value. Unlike former researches that have studied men's and women's speech in the area of sociolinguistics, the originality of the thesis lies in that it makes an analysis of genderlect differences from the perspective of interpersonal meaning within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar. Genderlect differences of interpersonal meaning is mainly investigated in mood system and appraisal system, with the view of language as a social semiotic, i.e. the study is the combination of interpersonal meaning analysis of genderlect differences with Halliday's socio-linguistic philosophy. It is hoped that this thesis would do good to the study of genderlect differences, as well as interpersonal meaning of language. Meanwhile, it is also hoped that the study would be good for the discussion and analysis of communicative styles between men and women, and provide reference for text analysis and English learning.