The Study On Interpersonal Function In English Medical Inserts

Since the second half of20th century, interpersonal function, the important part of Halliday’s metafunction theory, is widely employed to analyze various discourses,such as advertisement, news report and so on, while few researchers use it to work on the discourse of English Medical Inserts (EMIs for short).Hence this thesis attempts to apply Halliday’s theory of interpersonal function and Martin’s appraisal theory to investigate the interpersonal function in EMIs.Interpersonal function is deemed by systemic functional linguistics as the strand of meanings generated when people use language to interact with others,to establish and maintain links with them, to influence their behavior, to express their own viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change their. According to Halliday, interpersonal function is realized mainly by mood system and modality system from the lexical and grammar-level aspect; Martin’s appraisal system further analyzes the discourse from lexical angle,hence appraisal system is complementary to Halliday’s interpersonal function and expands it.EMIs are alien from other discourses but belong to the domain of ESP, aiming at delivering medicine information, making the information objective and scientific by wielding certain language skills.In order to probe into interpersonal function in EMIs,the writer downloaded randomly15pieces of antidepressant English inserts from the international website of electronic information of medicine, after the careful and objective analysis of the corpus, we discover:there are various sentence patterns, especially the declaratives with simple present tense and present perfect tense occupy a large percentage with an effort to express the scientific and objective information of medicine; at the same time, passive voice is used to make the contents of EMIs more objective and scientific.On the selection of the Subject, medicine itself as the Subject emphasizes the science and efficiency of the medicine, which makes the medicine’s authoritative state; if the Subject is the patient, it asks the patient to strictly follow the instructions; while omitting the Subject, it means that the manufacturer attempts to keep away from the consumers and avoid the potential conflicts.In terms of expressing obligation modality:more frequency use of high value modal operators are attempting to require the patients to the precautions and warnings of the medicine, while expressing possibilities, low value modal operators are applied to remind the patients of the possible situations occurred after taking medicine, those indicates that the manufacturer presents patients with full right to get know about the medicine, and then it protects the medicine manufacturer itself. Apart from those mentioned above, a lot of appraisal resources in EMIs are used to establish active relations with the consumers, they deliver the medicine information with the positive description to strengthen the efficiency of the medicine but without any direct sale promotion in this limited space.As a tentative study, the thesis has demonstrated the feasibility of realizing interpersonal function by ways of mood system, modality system and appraisal system in EMIs. Such research not only broadens the study on interpersonal function field, but sheds light on the composition of Chinese medicine’s English inserts, which boosts the process of the internationalization of Chinese medicine.