Interpretation Of Interpersonal GM In English Editorial Genre

The origin of discourse analysis should be dated back to classical rhetorics two hundred years ago. It was not until mid-1960s that modern discourse analysis began to develop, and has evolved from descriptive to explanative, from a surface-level analysis to a deeper functional approach ever since. More and more importance, in virtue of the deepening cognition of the communicative purposes and strategic choices, has been attached to genre analysis which aims at investigating communicative purposes and strategic choices of language use by discourse analysts. Systemic Functional Grammar provides a multi-level and multi-functional theoretical framework for discourse analysis (Halliday:1985;1994). The study of interpersonal meaning, as a key component of this framework, plays an important role in discourse analysis.Functional linguists view metaphor from the perspective of how a meaning is expressed. Halliday (ibid) regards metaphor as "variation" in the expression of meaning, which is not only limited at lexical level, but also located in grammatical level. The phenomenon of grammatical metaphor(GM thereafter) appearing in the expression of interpersonal meaning can be known as interpersonal GM. Former studies on interpersonal GM mainly concentrated on discussing its form and classification, few scholars employing interpersonal GM to analyze discourse, although its effect in genre analysis has begun to arouse attention. With the insight of the former researches, this thesis, taking interpersonal GM as a kind of strategic choice, attempts to show how and why it contributes a lot to realizing the communicative purposes in editorials.200 editorials from Washington Post and New York Times are collected by random sampling from the Internet to be studied. In light of Halliday's viewpoint on grammatical metaphor, this thesis will try, first of all, to identify interpersonal GM in sampling articles. Then both qualitative and quantitativeapproaches are adopted to analyze the samples. The result of this research indicates that the phenomenon of interpersonal GM not only extensively exists in editorial articles, but also plays an indispensable role in its two main communicative purposes: persuasion and evaluation. Moving from a surface-level descriptions of language use to a more functional explanation, this thesis figures out the features of interpersonal GM, thus offers a reasonable explanation of the writer's strong consciousness of using interpersonal GM.The present study demonstrates the idea that Systemic Functional Grammar provides a multi-level and multi-functional theoretical framework for discourse analysis. What's more, the study of this thesis illustrates from one perspective the subtleties of language use in English editorial discourse, making a lot contribution to comprehensively understanding editorials and having a great insight into the author's intention and the theme of the text.