A Study Of Chinese Pharmaceutical Instructions From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Function

Systemic-functional linguistics created by M.A.K. Halliday has half a century of history, which has developed rapidly in recent 20 years. Halliday claims that the“functions” of language is a crucial conception and the function theory should can explain the internal structure of language. And he summarizes functions of language as three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. In recent years, more and more scholars have adopted interpersonal function to analyze various discourses, such as novels, advertisements, speeches and news etc.. However, there are few people using it to analyze Chinese pharmaceutical instructions.Chinese pharmaceutical instructions are a kind of commonly scientific expositions, whose purpose is to introduce the relevant information of medicine. At the same time, the drug manufacturer also needs to employ some language means to build a kind of interpersonal relationship with a multitude of patients, creating this drug's authoritative position in the medical industries and promoting patients to comply with the doctors' orders strictly. By taking systemic-functional grammar as the fundamental framework and regarding thirty Chinese pharmaceutical instructions as research objects, this paper explores interpersonal meaning and realization means of Chinese pharmaceutical instructions from two perspectives, i.e. mood system and modality system. And the author mainly studies three research questions in this paper:(1) What are the linguistic realizations of interpersonal function in Chinese pharmaceutical instructions?(2) How does mood system develop the interpersonal relationship between the drug manufacturer and consumers?(3) How does modality system develop the interpersonal relationship between the drug manufacturer and consumers?In the process of analysis,the author adopts system analysis method,qualitative research method,quantitative research method and statistic analysis method to specifically analyze how the subjects,sentence patterns and modal words of different values realize interpersonal meaning.The results are shown as following.Firstly,on the selection of the subject,“??”acting as the subject reflects objectivity and authority of Chinese pharmaceutical instructions;patients acting as the subject intends to warn that patients should take medicine rightly and accurately;whereas,zerosubject can shorten the psychological distance between the drug manufacturer and patients.Secondly,on the selection of sentence patterns,the drug manufacturer uses declarative sentences to deliver the objective and authentic information of drugs to patients and employs imperative sentences to provide suggestions and commands for them.Thirdly,when expressing possibility modality,the drug manufacturer mainly uses modal words of low value to inform patients of the situations that may occur after taking medicine,which reflects that the drug manufacturer comprehensively takes into account side effects of the drugs.This way not only protects patients'life safety but also safeguards his interests.Finally,when expressing obligation modality,he mainly employs high value modal words to remind patients of the matters that they need pay attention to before taking medicine.On one hand, this study not only expands the research field of interpersonal function but also provides references for language scholars to interpret this kind of discourses from new perspectives. On the other hand, this study not only makes the drug manufacturer write pharmaceutical instructions in a more regulated manner, but also makes consumers better understand and apply pharmaceutical instructions.