| According to Halliday (1978: 135), text is a semantic unit. At the level of semantics, language has ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning, which are used as the basis for exploring how meanings are created and understood. This present thesis focuses on the interpersonal meaning at the level of semantics. The analysis of the interpersonal function focuses on the clause—a basic unit in expressing meanings, especially on mood and modality system of the clause. The purpose of this analysis is to find out the different realizations of interpersonal function in the two subgenres of English news—English news reports and English editorials.This thesis is composed of three chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One presents a literature review of the related theories that have studied news English as a discourse, including Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. At the same time this thesis also presents van Dijk's research on news discourse and Morley's research on English editorial discourse. The Appraisal System is also introduced. In this thesis, the traditional descriptions of mood and modality are presented as well to form a contrast with Halliday's view on mood and modality.In Chapter Two, the interpersonal function is explained in detail. This chapter is divided into two parts—mood and modality, which are described separately. Chapter Three is a comparative analysis of the different realizations of interpersonal function in English news reports and editorials. In this chapter English news reports and editorials are analyzed separately under the framework given in Chapter Two.The result of the analysis is that there are similarities as well as differences between English news reports and editorials. The differences lie in four aspects: variety of mood, the use of quotes, the use of modality and the use of modality metaphor. The only similarity we can find between English news reports and... |
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