A Study On The Mood System Of Prosecutors’Language From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Meaning

Interpersonal meaning originates from interpersonal metafunction, one of the three metafunctions in systemic functional linguistics. In verbal communication, interpersonal meaning emphasizes the interactivity of language which advocates that language can not only be used to convey information, but can be used to express the speaker’s identity, social class, attitude and motivation and to establish and maintain social relationship as well. When communicating with others, speakers tend to choose a specific speech role for themselves and expect listeners to have a complementary role. There are two speech roles in general:"giving" and "demanding". Through verbal communication, speakers give or demand information or goods&service. When taking the commodity of the exchange and the two speech roles together, we can get four primary speech functions of offer, statement, command and question. Mood is one of the important means to realize interpersonal meaning. There are general rules on the corresponding relationship between mood and speech functions, but it is not one-to-one correspondence for the exceptions to the general rules, which forms the concept of interpersonal metaphor.Since Halliday proposed the theories on interpersonal meaning and mood system, numerous researches employing these theories have been done on texts of literature, advertisement and speech, but few on courtroom discourse. As a kind of institutional discourse, courtroom discourse is an activity participated, actively or passively, by parties with different aims within the restriction under the power of the court pursuing a result consistent with their own interest. The distinguishing feature of courtroom discourse is that it is restricted by the institutional rules of the court, which causes its structural characteristics (Ran Yongping&Zhang Xinhong,2007:252). The nature of courtroom discourse is closely related to the features of its mood system, on the basis of which, this thesis studies the mood system of prosecutors’language when questioning witnesses in criminal trial combing the theories on mood and interpersonal meaning with the characteristics of courtroom discourse.The data used in this thesis is the transcript of the criminal trial on the murder case of O. J. Simpson which is called "Trial of the Century". The language of the prosecutors when questioning witnesses in this trial is selected to meet the need of the subject of this thesis. This thesis studies, firstly, the rules on the distribution of each mood in prosecutors’ language and the corresponding relationship between each mood and speech functions in general, then contrasts the differences of the rules on the distribution of each mood and the corresponding relationship between mood and speech functions of the prosecutors’ language in direct examination and in cross examination. Through overall analysis of the mood system from both macro and micro perspectives, the thesis then concludes the characteristics of the prosecutors’ language and tries to interpret these findings from the perspective of interpersonal meaning.The study shows that there are differences in the distribution of interrogative mood, declarative mood and imperative mood between the general analysis and the analysis in direct examination and cross examination, and the corresponding relationship between mood and speech functions is relatively stable while the syntactic modes in each mood corresponding to speech functions are different. Prosecutors participate in direct examination and cross examination with different aims realized by different speech functions, which determines different rules on the distribution of each mood.