A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Shanxi Folk Songs

Folk songs originate from the “human instinct” and “need”, and they expresspeople’s desires and thoughts. They are sung with emotions and feelings. They are theproducts of love and tone. The folk songs are true portrayal and the crystallization ofwisdom of the working-people, whose contents relate to all aspects of the social life.Folk songs reflect the real life of the working people and their minds, emotions, willsand desires from different perspectives in different ways. Folk songs can inspirepeople’s emotions and reflect the interactive relationships between people, especiallybetween the singer and the audiences. Interpersonal function, as one of the three basicmetafunctions of systemic-functional grammar, is the function that language reflectsthe communication among people. It means that people use language to establish andmaintain interpersonal relationships, and influence others’ behavior. However, fewresearches have been done on the interpersonal meaning of folk songs texts. For thisreason, this study will fill this gap.This research chooses30Zuoquan folk songs as target of text analysis. Based oninterpersonal meaning of Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, the author adoptsthe qualitative method to analyze the folk songs collected, and then reveals how theZuoquan folk songs influence the audiences by realizing the interpersonal relationships.This thesis tries to solve the following three questions:1) How is interpersonal meaning in Zuoquan folk songs realized through themood system?2) How is interpersonal meaning in Zuoquan folk songs realized through themodality system?3) How is interpersonal meaning in Zuoquan folk songs realized through theperson system?By analyzing, the author has found that, in mood system, the declarative moodhas the highest frequency both in the clauses and the songs. The following one is the interrogative mood, and imperative mood is the least frequently occurred. In modalitysystem, most of the modal verbs belong to the high value. They reflect usuality andinclination, but not probability and obligation. In person system, because the greatestcharacteristic of singing folk songs is the vernacular used, in the Zuoquan folk songs,and the first person like “俺”，“�'�”，“奴”，“奴家” are the mostfrequently used. Next is the second person “你”, but the third person is the least.Besides, the use of the address forms is also special, such as “亲格旦”、“小亲格呆”、“小亲亲”、“小爱爱” in love songs. The use of different personpronouns and address forms can enhance the sense of participation of the audiences,and shorten psychological distance between the singer and the audiences. As the firstexploratory research, the present study provides a new perspective for the study ofsystemic functional linguistics in folk songs discourses. It also contributes todeepening people’s understanding of the Zuoquan local folk culture and the nationalculture ideology. However, because the relative researches and the author’s knowledgeand material are limited, further researches by other scholars and professors are needed.