A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Fundraising Texts

The present paper sets out to investigate the realization of interpersonal meaning in Chinese fundraising texts from the approach of systemic-functional grammar and appraisal theory. Interpersonal meaning is a term drawn from Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. It refers to how we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relationships with them, to influence their behaviors, to express our own viewpoints on things in the world, and to elicit or change others' opinions. According to Halliday, the realization of interpersonal meaning is typically fulfilled by mood, modality. While many other researchers demonstrate that Halliday does not exhaust all the linguistic devices which carry the interpersonal meaning. That is to say, the theoretical framework of interpersonal meaning should be supplemented and the means of realizing interpersonal meaning can be multiple. Martin states that the interpersonal meaning can be realized by evaluation in appraisal theory.李战子claims other linguistic patterns to realize interpersonal meaning, such as person system, tense, direct quotations, etc.. The present study mainly focuses on how interpersonal meaning in fundraising texts can be realized through linguistic devices.Fundraising is the process of soliciting and gathering money or other gifts by requesting donations from individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies. Therefore, fundraising texts function as conveying the information of the fundraising objects that are in need of help to the potential donators in order to persuade them to contribute to worthy causes or to underwrite philanthropic programs. So the language in fundraising texts has strong persuasive power which can stimulate the potential donators' emotion and influence the interpersonal relationship between participants. Many linguists have been studying fundraising texts from their language features and genre effectively; however, the research of interpersonal meaning in fundraising texts is comparatively rare. Thus, mainly based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar and Martin's appraisal theory, this dissertation aims to explore interpersonal meaning of written fundraising texts and discover how the writers of the fundraising texts persuade the potential donators to donate money or provide other help by means of using linguistic devices in fundraising texts. And this paper proves that the means of realizing interpersonal meaning in fundraising texts are various, rich and complicated. There are 30 fundraising texts chosen for our data analysis from different sources. Five pieces of fundraising texts have been gotten directly from throwaways handed out by the fundraisers, five pieces from magazines, such as幸福,当代大学生,etc., ten pieces from the campus boarding-board, and the last ten pieces from the websites. In order to make the data objective and reliable, we just focus on Chinese fundraising texts because it is beyond the author's ability to get the original English fundraising texts.Through close observation of the data, it is decided that four kinds of linguistic resources are explored in this thesis: mood, modality, person and evaluation. They work together to achieve the interpersonal meaning in fundraising texts. It is found that the uses of different mood types aim to achieve different communicative purposes. The employment of imperatives is to persuade the readers to get involved in the fundraising activities. Interrogatives function to capture the readers' attention consciously. Declaratives are used to give information about the fundraising objects. Modality is deployed to emphasize the benefits brought by the fundraising activities to the target readers and try to drive them to take charitable action. The use of different person pronouns can fulfill different communicative tasks. The first person pronouns help strengthen in-group identity with the readers and make the content of the fundraising texts objective and reliable. Second person pronouns are used to create a 'dialogue' feature in the texts and make the interaction move on smoothly. The third person pronouns and proper names function to add credit to the content of the fundraising texts. As to the evaluation system, it plays an important role in establishing solidarity and maintaining relationship with the readers. Thus, the interpersonal meaning of fundraising texts can be realized in mood system, modality system, person system and evaluation system.It is hoped that this tentative analysis of linguistic realization of interpersonal meaning will be a helpful supplement to the studies on fundraising texts, and meanwhile it will deepen the readers' understanding of fundraising texts and enable writers to be better-informed about how to express interpersonal meaning appropriately through lexico-grammar in fundraising texts so as to achieve the communicative goal successfully.