Exploring The Interaction Between Writer And Reader In Written Discourse

This thesis falls into the category of discourse analysis. Taking the functional grammar as the starting point and combing Wittgenstein's game theory, this thesis extends the research area and adjusts the research elements to explore the writer-reader interaction, and this study proves to be necessary and practicable.The main body of the thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter one gives a brief view of the background, present situation, purpose and significance of this study. Chapter two gives the definition, classification, and especially the theoretical basis of this study.Chapter three is the most important one in this thesis. I classify the complicated interaction into interactional and interactive resources to make a down-to-earth study and this is what is new in my thesis. The former aspect emphasizes the ways in which the reader takes part in discourse constructing and meaning generating, and this can be realized from three aspects. First, the writer makes use of modality system to claim different degrees of certainty so as to make the discourse convincing as well as revealing. Second, the writer makes use of questions, commands and naming to pull for the readers to get into the discourse. Third, the writer constructs his/her discourse with matching organizationpatterns to engage the reader in meaning generation. The latter aspect-the interactive aspect- emphasizes the ways in which writers take the (imagined) readers' expectations, knowledge and interest into account in constructing texts. It is also realized from three aspects. First, the writer permeates the reader's expectations into his/her discourse. Second, the writer makes use of guiding signals to give the reader step-by-step guidance. Third, the writer makes use of sequence organization patterns to realize interacting with the reader.The last chapter mainly discusses the practical implications in improving writing and reading skills y based on a great deal of discourse analysis.The contribution of the thesis is three-fold. First, the combination of two theories makes the study easy to go at the discourse level. Second, the classification method supplies an efficient way to study the interaction in written discourse. Third, the study is education-oriented. This thesis shows us a clear picture of the writer's constructing process and the reader's decoding process. It can facilitate teaching of advanced reading and writing by acquainting students with insights about the interactional and interactive resources.