The Interpersonal Meaning In Medical Journal Research Articles

According to the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), language embodies in itself three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Literature suggests that there is a considerable amount of research on the ideational and textual meanings. However, research on the interpersonal meaning is relatively insufficient, particularly in the case of scientific written text. Therefore, this thesis attempts to conduct some research on the interpersonal meaning and its linguistic realization in medical journal research articles, one important genre of scientific written text.The interpersonal meaning refers to the semantic component through which the speaker/writer intrudes himself in the context of situation, expressing his own attitude and judgment and seeking to influence the attitude and behavior of others. The social functional view of language of the SFL and Bakhtin's theory of dialogism provide the basic theoretical foundations for the current study. To carry out the study, a corpus of medical journal RAs of about 225 thousand running words is set up. Viewing written text as process instead of product, we examine the corpus carefully in terms of interpersonal meaning and its linguistic realization.The findings show that there is interaction between the writer and the reader in the genre, which is traditionally believed to be informational, objective, precise, and impersonal, and there are many linguistic devices, like modal expressions and personal pronouns, that serve to realize the interpersonal meaning. Further research shows that the writer-reader interaction is a result of the tension or social interaction involved in academic writing.The significance of the study lies in two aspects. Theoretically, it introduces Bakhtin's theory of dialogism into the domain of linguistic study, which throws new light on the understanding of written texts and may provide a new perspective for linguistic study, and tests the validity of SFL as a theory for discourse analysis as well. In practice, it may provide a new approach in the teaching of scientific writing. That is, in the teaching of scientific writing, we should pay equal attention to the interactional aspects of academic written texts and use the SFL conception "choice is meaning" as a guideline.