Interpersonal Meaning In English Business Letter Of Adjustment

This study intends to explore various approaches for realizing the interpersonal meaning in letters of adjustment on the basis of Halliday’s SFG and Martin’s Appraisal theory.The author selected45adjustment letters at random from the textbook published openly, including Courses for International Business Letter Writing, Contemporary Business Writing, English Business Letter Writing and internet etc. as the data for the thesis. In this study, both quantitative study method and qualitative study method are employed in the process of conducting of the thesis, among which quantitative study method is exploited to find out the usage frequency of linguistic devices on realizing the interpersonal meaning in language resource chosen; qualitative study method is exploited to analyze the realization process of mood, modality, person and evaluation of interpersonal meaning in adjustment letters.Through the analysis of the45letters of adjustment, the author finds that in the choice of mood, the writers mainly choose declarative mood to transfer concrete information and express favorable desire; the imperative and conditional clause are less frequent in this kinds of letter; and interrogative mood is hardly employed by the writers of the letter of adjustment; as for the modality, in order to lighten the intense atmosphere, the writers consciously adopt low and median value modals to express their willingness of pursuing a win-win result; in the person system, the first and the second pronouns are frequently used to shorten the emotional distance between the two sides; in the choice of evaluative words, for maintaining good relationships with other persons involved, the writers prefer to use more positive words to convey the sincerity of solving the problem.