A Functional Approach To Generic Structure And Modality In English Business Complaint Letters

The present research is an analysis of modality in the generic structure of English business complaint letters (EBCL) from the perspective of functional grammar.Business complaint letters which communicate a kind of unpleasant information have their own linguistic features, and they often require some better language skills from the writer in order to achieve their special communicative purposes and interpersonal functions. In the present research, this special genre, English business complaint letters, will be chosen as the case study.With modal expressions, people express their attitudes toward certain things. In Halliday's Functional Grammar, modality is a subsystem of the mood system, realizing the interpersonal meaning of language through various linguistic forms. That modality is concerned with people's opinions and interpersonal relationship makes it possible and true that modality is greatly used in EBCL. From this point of view, the author decides to make a tentative research by combining the genre of EBCL with the knowledge of modality.From the perspective of functional grammar, this study aims to explore the relationship between modality and the genre of EBCL. It attempts to analyze how modality is applied to realizing the communicative purpose and interpersonal function in the generic structure of EBCL, and to discuss what roles modality plays in such letters. Based on the theoretical framework of this study, firstly, the tenor, the communicative purpose(s) and the generic structure of EBCL are analyzed. Secondly, the study identifies all the modal expressions in the corpus trying to find out those which are most frequently used. Thirdly, a modality analysis is presented in detail, including analyses of modality type, modal value and modal orientation. Fourthly, based on the previous findings, the study analyzes the distribution of modal expressions in the generic structure of EBCL. Up to this step, the most important questions in this research can be answered. Finally, the paper further discusses what function modality performs in EBCL.