An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning On Current International Affairs In VOA News Reports

People use language to interact with, establish and maintain relations with others, to influence their behavior, to express viewpoints on things in the world, and to elicit or change theirs. This function of language is termed as interpersonal meaning.The concept of interpersonal meaning is derived from Halliday's functional grammar. As the initiator of functional grammar, Halliday clearly points out that the purpose of setting up functional grammar is to provide an analyzing structure for discourse analysis and the analyzing structure is useful to any text, spoken or written in English. Though many scholars are supporters of it in China, only a few of them have adopted functional grammar as the sole framework in discourse studies. Therefore, the functional approach is adopted in the present thesis for analyzing the interpersonal meaning of VOA news reports.On the basis of functional grammar, the thesis employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches. With 52 pieces of VOA news reports (In the News) as data, the thesis analyzes how the interpersonal meaning is generally realized in these reports from the perspective of mood and modality, tense and quotation. The study finds that:(1) The modal verb "will" is most frequently used in VOA news reports. The news reporters use 'will' to express their standpoints and attitudes towards events so as to make the listeners believe that the reports are objective and true. In addition, the use of other modal verbs such as 'can', 'could', 'should', 'would', 'may', etc. also plays an important role in the news reports to express the new reporters' thoughts, attitudes and standpoints.(2) The proper use of the present tense and the combination of the present and the past tense can perform important interpersonal meanings. These applications, on the one hand, can show that the contents of the reports are present-oriented; on the other hand, can convey the hews reporters' current viewpoints and standpoints by reporting the past events.(3) The interpersonal meaning of direct quotation is mainly manifested in two aspects: enhancing the objectivity of the reports and conveying ideology and evaluation.The above findings show that Halliday's functional grammar is quite scientific and practical in the analysis of the interpersonal meaning of a discourse. Furthermore, this study will be helpful to a better understanding of the language characteristics in English news reports and improve the listeners' ability to appreciate English news.