The Construction Of An Integrative Interpersonal Framework And The Generic Feature Analysis Of News Report

Genre is a research area that has been deserving long discussion. The researchers attach it to the definitions from the various perspectives. The recent studies recognize genre as a social activity type rather than a linguistic or text type. Systemic functional linguistics defines genre as the generic structural potential in relation to the register and the context of situation. Halliday specifies three situational variables on the level of the context of situation: field, tenor and mode, which are correspondingly in relation to the ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning in the register. The alternation of each of these situational variables, undoubtedly, can easily change the generic features of the particular discourse.According to systemic functional linguistics, meaning can be realized by the linguistic resources on the lexico-grammatical level. Correspondingly the author's purposeful selection of the linguistic resources on the lexico-grammatical level can also reveal the generic features of the particular discourse.In this dissertation, the author takes the interpersonal meaning as the focus of study, investigating how the interpersonal meaning can contribute to realizing the generic features of a particular discourse. In Halliday's sense, mood and modality are the major linguistic resources to realize the interpersonal meaning. By detailed analysis of the interpersonal linguistic resources, the author tries to construct an interpersonal framework on the lexico-grammatical level comprising the linguistic resources on different ranks: the ranks of sentence, clause and lexical item in addition to the mood and modality proposed by Halliday Furthermore, the author tries to analyze the generic features of one of the subgenres of news report-the interpretive report on the basis of the constructed interpersonal framework.The power relationship also plays an indispensable role in realizing the generic features of a particular discourse, since genre is a social activity type rather than a linguistic or text type. On the level of the context of situation, the author tries toinvestigate how the writer of a particular discourse employs the particular linguistic resources to invoke the heteroglossic diversity. The author tries to construct an interactive interpersonal framework on the level of the context of situation. Based on the detailed analysis of the heteroglossic diversity in the editorial, the author tries to make clear that the heteroglossic diversity is one of the most important generic features of the editorial though in the common sense it is a 'monologue'.Generally speaking, this dissertation aims to achieve the following purposes: (1) make a thorough investigation of how the interpersonal linguistic resources are employed to realize the generic features of a particular discourse. (2) expand the interpersonal framework proposed by Halliday and construct an integrative interpersonal framework that comprises two levels: the lexico-grammatical level and the level of social interaction.