A Study On Interpersonal Meaning In News Discourse

Halliday developed Systemic-Functional Linguistics(SFL) in which he analyzed the function of the language into three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunction. The interpersonal metafunction is about the social world, especially the relationship between speaker and hearer. It serves to establish and maintain social relations such as the expression of social roles, which include the communication roles created by means of the interaction between one person and another.News, as an important mass media, plays a leading role in people's daily life. It tells people what is happening around us, in other parts of the country and throughout the world. Without it, people will be isolated from the world. It affects a number of spheres of our lives as well as our minds. Therefore, it has been studied by many people from different perspectives, related to vocabulary, structural features, stylistic features and rhetoric features and provided a wealth of valuable theory to the study of news discourse.In news discourse, it is viewed as a particular type of communicative events between the writer and the reader(the foci of this paper is written news discourse), the writer always claims that his coverage is neutral and objective.This paper is based on the SFL theory and other relevant theory. It focuses on the interpersonal meaning of news discourse. It gives a detail analysis on the ten pieces of news about the conflict between Israel and Lebanon happened in 2006 which are randomly taken from the American journal TIME in the year 2006.From the analysis, we find out that the linguistic resources: personal pronoun, modality, tense, passive voice and thematic progression are the main factors which affect the realization of the interpersonal meaning in the news discourse. The writer uses these ways to attract the reader's attention and try to influence the reader's worldviews and attitude. The writer's orientation is not directly expressed, he expresses his attitude or power relations through the seemingly neutral language.