| As a particular written discourse, English business letters have attracted pervasiveattention from linguists at home and abroad. Sales letters (SLs) and claim letters (CLs)are two different subtypes of business letters. Mood, modality and person system havebeen skillfully applied to realize writers’ interactive goals in the letters.In order to reveal different ways for interpersonal realization in the two kinds ofbusiness letters, this thesis takes interpersonal function in Systemic-FunctionalGrammar (SFG) as the framework to comparatively explore the use of mood, modalityand person system in30SLs and30CLs respectively.The results show that declarative is largely used in both of the two samples, dueto the needs of stating facts, whereas imperative and interrogative occupy a muchsmaller proportion. Compared with CLs, SLs contain relatively more imperative andinterrogative for the purpose of arousing the potential customers’ interests. FiniteModal Operators with median value take the highest share among the three values,which express the writers’ confidence as well as help avoid strong pressure on theother side. In SLs, the rate of low value operators is much higher than that in CLs,while it is the opposite as for the use of high value operators. As far as ModalAdjuncts and predicators are concerned, the two kinds of letters exhibit muchdifference in use because of the varieties of those two means. In a word, thosesimilarities and differences are the responses to writers’ various interactive goals.There are two aims of analyzing interpersonal function in those two subtypes ofbusiness letters: one is to reveal the different manifestation of interpersonal function inthe samples and to seek the causes of this difference, which would help highlight thesignificance of interpersonal function in English business letters; the other is to offersome theoretical guidance for English business writing through this comparativeanalysis. |
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