A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning On Bad-News English Business Letters

With the tremendous growth in economic globalization and reform and opening-up, business activities are frequently seen nowadays. Business letters have played an increasingly important role in establishing and maintaining cooperative relationships.English business letters, as one of the main media of written communication on business activities, represent the image of both sides in business and the company.In order to make the communication smooth between the two sides, the use of appropriate and specific language is required to express their views, opinions and attitudes. Therefore, how the language expressed is particularly indispensable in the process of communication. At present, the research achievements at home and abroad for business letters are not uncommon, in which stylistics, pragmatics and other research theory are used in order to strengthen the teaching of English business writing. With the development of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, study of business letters in this perspective are also gradually increasing. In the field of business English, either in terms of cooperation and politeness pragmatic theory, or from the study of the language features and translation, the research of business English discourse research is quite abundant. But when it comes to the English business letters which exploit interpersonal function under functional grammar, appraisal system and face theory, the quantity can be poor, so in this area there remain certain space for development.Based on Halliday’s interpersonal function theory and Martin’s appraisal theory, this article scrutinizes the realization of interpersonal function in38 bad-news business letters, respectively from the lexical level, syntactic level and textual level, in order to find specific words and discourse-arranging features about Business English letter. Previous study of this letter is more inclined to complain for class, and the corpus of this paper is not limited to a certain type of letter, the inspection scope covers complaining, claiming, urging, rejecting, warning, appealing and declining letters. This paper, taking qualitative and quantitative research methods as the methodology, analyzes and explores these English business letters from the perspective of mood, person, modality and evaluation system to examine the realization of interpersonal function which is used to study how to use vocabulary, syntax and discourse to realize interpersonal meaning. Due to the fact that this kind of letter is conveying bad news to the reader. They will, to a large extent, hurt each other’s "face", such as refusal and criticism. Inappropriate disposal will have a detrimental effect on communication and can directly affect the relationship. Therefore, this paper, taking Brown and Levinson’s face theory as the supplementary study, selects15letters from38samples concerning a certain type for further comparative study. Quantitative method is arranged to have an analysis on differences and similarities on choice of vocabulary, grammar and discourse arrangement between the15letters and those other letters. At the same time, qualitative method is also used to describe how this type of letter through the appropriate politeness strategies to reduce the threat to face each other, to further improve the validity of the letter. The research purpose of this thesis is to prove that the interpersonal meaning of this kind of business letters can be realized by systemic functional grammar, which in turn adds the coverage of this theory. The author hopes that the result can provide academic reference for the writing and studying of business letters.This paper is divided into seven chapters. Chapter One introduces and elaborates the research significance, purpose, research methodology, the logical structure and previous research. Chapter Two concerns about the theoretical framework, including Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, Martin’s appraisal system and Brown, Levinson’s face theory. Chapter Three discusses the diversified resources in the process of realization of interpersonal function in mood, person and modality system in implementation. Chapter Four is mainly concerned with the attitude and graduation and its embodiment in the interpersonal function. Chapter Five analyzes politeness strategies in bad-news letters which are used to preserve the recipient face from the vocabulary characteristics, syntactic and arrangement of discourse. The last chapter is the conclusion of this paper.