The Realization Of Interpersonal Meaning In English Sales Promotion Letters

The present paper sets out to investigate the realization of interpersonal meaning in English sales promotion letters based on Halliday's conceptual framework. The interpersonal meaning is concerned with the interaction between addresser and addressee, the grammatical resources for enacting social roles in general, and speech roles in particular, in dialogic interaction which means establishing, changing, and maintaining interpersonal relations. According to Halliday, the realization of interpersonal meaning is fulfilled lexico-grammatically by mood and modality. Mood is the system which establishes role relationships between addresser and addressee, while modality bears the speaker's assessment of the truth of his / her message.Thirty randomly collected authentic sales promotion letters are exploited for analysis. As regards mood, the author concentrates on the Subject choices and speech functions; as for modality, the author pays special attention to modal operators.The analyses reveal that a variety of lexico-grammatical resources have been employed skillfully by the sales letter writer to realize the interpersonal meaning derived from the tenor of sales promotion letters. It has the following findings: 1) Different Subject choices (especially choices of pronouns) play a role in establishing power and solidarity and in achieving manipulation. The most frequent Subject choice in our corpus is the second-person form "you". 2) Mood is primarily oriented towards the interaction between the writer and reader. The speech functions of questions and commands in sales promotion letters require overt response and deserve our attention. Under the influence of the tenor of sales promotion letters, questions and commands can be congruently and metaphorically realized by mood types. 3) Modality is used to indicate the writer'sattitude. The dispersion of the modal operator reveals the tension between the writer's need to be assertive about the benefits of the product being promoted so as to persuade the reader to take action to buy it and the writer's need not to impose too much on the reader in order to save the reader's negative face.