An Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In English Product Recall Statements From The Perspective Of Functional Grammar

Recent years, recall events constantly appear in the economic news. Actually, in nineteeneighties, foreign countries have constructed relevant regulations. Publishing the recallstatement is an action employed to remedy the company’s undermined image and to offerrelevant solutions to the problem.Halliday categories three metafunctions of language, ideational metafunction,interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunciton, in which interpersonal function is the onethe thesis intends to examine. The purpose of communication is that we want to influence theirbehavior or attitudes, or to express our own attitudes and explain our behavior, or to provideinformation that others do not know, or to get information from others and so on. The means ofrealizing interpersonal meaning includes mood system, person system and modality system.This thesis, from the perspective of systemic functional theory, attempts to analyze theinterpersonal meaning realized by various methods in25English product recall statements.The study places the focus on speech roles, mood system and modal system to investigate thewording skills at the lexical-grammatical level in the English product recall statements. Thepaper uses quantitative method to give supplementary explanation which is realized by figuresand tables added in the thesis to make the research a quantized one. As for the tables, throughstatistics, they show the frequency and percentage of different means in realizing interpersonalmeanings. And then, according to the statistics, the thesis also gives qualitative analysis withexact examples to figure out important findings. As for mood system, declaratives are the mostfrequently used mood structures in the25sample statements. As to person system, a very largepart of the subjects of all the sentences are the third person system. The first person pronounsare second to the third person system. Then, as to the modal system, the major modalexpressions in sample statements are finite modal operators, modal adjuncts, expansions ofpredicator and modality metaphors. The percentage of modal operators is the largest of thefour.This thesis consists of five parts. Part one briefly introduces the purpose and significanceof this study, the methods of data collection and the quantitative and qualitative methods ofdata analysis. This part introduces the concept of recall event and product recall statement. Parttwo is the literature review on the researches of recall statement and the previous study onsystemic-functional grammar. Part three is the detailed explanation of the theoreticalframework applied in this thesis. It has three main parts: speech roles, mood and modality. Partfour is the most important part dealing with the analysis. Both quantitative and qualitativemethods are applied as the primary analysis methods to analyze the modality system inproduct recall statement from interpersonal perspective. Part five draws a conclusion of wholethesis and points out the limitations of the previous study and offers some suggestions for thestudy in this field in the future.