An Analysis Of A TV Talk Show-Yang Lan One On One From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Metafunction

The mass media plays an important role in the social life of people. People canuse language to interact with others, build and maintain the relations with other people.They interpret their ideas and attitudes to others. This kind of function is calledinterpersonal metafunction by Halliday according to his systemic functional grammar.Within the rich diversity of its means of realizing interpersonal function, mood andmodality are two important methods to realize interpersonal function. In Yang LanOne on One the interpersonal function can be realized by the utterances of the hostand the guests. The studies on TV show from the perspective of systemic functionalgrammar are few in number, especially on the talk show program. This paper is a try.It mainly adopts Halliday’s theory of interpersonal function to analyze the famousChinese talk show Yang Lan One on One.This paper is based on the interpersonal metafunction by Halliday according tohis systemic functional grammar. The theories of the mood, modality are implementedfor the analysis. And the data in this paper are collected from the transcription of thevideos of the program within three years. Both qualitative and quantitative methodsare applied in this paper. And how interpersonal function is realized by mood andmodality through concrete examples in this paper, and the distribution of some typicaltypes of mood and modality are calculated as well.The results are found in this research: interpersonal meaning in the TV talk showcan be realized by the choices of mood and modality. The host and guests fulfill thespeech roles in the talk show, and their different choices of mood and modalityrepresent their typical mood and modality system and enable the interaction.Meanwhile the different grammatical mood choices can affect their relationship andtheir social cultural roles. While the interpersonal function of the talk show is realized,the mass media’s social function can be achieved. This paper is hoped to enrich thepresent studies on mass media, as well as interpersonal function of systemicfunctional grammar.