Interpersonal Functional Analysis Of Degree Adverbs In English Business Text Discourses

The appraisal theory, put forward by Martin, leads people to be more aware of the interpersonal function of words. In a specific discourse as genre, the interpersonal relationship becomes prominent because of the prosodic lexical structures analyzed by the appraisal theory. With degree adverbs as research object and the basic framework of functional linguistics, the thesis, referenced the certain interpersonal meaning raised by Li Zhanzi. It belonged to an exploration of some specific parts of speech on interpersonal functions of multidimensional perspectives in discourse analysis, from the macro genre of business English text discourse, to micro studies in discourse semantics based on the appraisal theory with prosodic structure performance.In method, integrated analyses in the quantitative and qualitative are adopted. By means of a corpus-driven study, this study was examined in self-built corpus from 175 business English teaching texts. Meanwhile, some lexical and textual software, such as UAM CorpusTool3.1 and so on, were applied to assist in analysis, with some typical text analysis. The findings were as follows. Firstly, it could be obvious that degree adverbs are one of most important attitudinal prosodic resources in interpersonal communication process. But for the whole attitudinal interactive communication, they could play as intensifiers or resonance for the whole prosodic wave directly or indirectly. Secondly, there existed several interpersonal function features of degree adverbs. Attitude directly restricted Engagement and Graduation, while Graduation influences Attitude and Engagement greatly to an extreme. Finally, with different interpersonal purpose in business discourses, degree adverbs could engage themselves directly to appraise Attitude, or strengthen or weaken it together with other components. They could works together for realizing the interpersonal function of the entire business discourse with cumulative features in prosody, serving for the global communicative purpose in appraisal system, while adjusting the relationship between the participants. Meanwhile, according to the discourse semantics, DAs in the prosodic orbital distribution mode might reflect central and balanced features for the interpersonal meaning.This study can offer important insights for expanding or deepening the degree adverbs as evaluative resources. It well fits the thorough study of the appraisal theory and the associated appliance. And it is of great help for developing some references to studies of other generic interpersonal meanings. In addition, for the Business English majors, they will benefit a lot in their literacy to some extent.