A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And American Scenic Spot Publicity Materials

Interpersonal meaning plays an important part in the study of systemic functional linguistics. According to Halliday(1994, 2004), people use language to express three kinds of meanings simultaneously: ideational, textual and interpersonal. In terms of the three meanings, Halliday(2000) takes interpersonal meaning as the meaning of language when it is used by people to communicate with each other, to build and keep relations with each other, to convey opinions and to produce effect on the views as well as behaviors of others.Under the guidance of Halliday's theory about interpersonal meaning, this thesis analyzes the interpersonal meaning of Chinese and American scenic spot publicity materials, with thirty samples respectively. To make the analysis more practical and valid,the author adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to compare the characteristics of interpersonal meaning between Chinese and American scenic spot publicity materials.In this thesis, the sixty samples are representative scenic spot publicity materials collected from authorized websites. The contrastive analysis is conducted on the basis of mood,modality and person systems. The purpose is to examine how interpersonal meaning is embodied in Chinese and American scenic spot publicity materials and thus to find out the similarities and differences between them. In addition, this thesis is intended to shed some light on the translation of Chinese scenic spot publicity materials from the perspective of interpersonal meaning.Through the analysis and discussion, some major findings are given. In mood system,both Chinese and American scenic spot publicity materials use the declarative mood most frequently, which coincides with the communicative function of offering information to tourists. American scenic spot publicity materials use interrogative and imperative moods more often than Chinese ones. In modality system, both Chinese and American scenic spotpublicity materials hardly use comment adjuncts but use mood adjuncts a lot. However,Chinese scenic spot publicity materials use much more mood adjuncts than American ones.As for finite modal operators, both Chinese and American scenic spot publicity materials have a preference for low and median value modal operators and hardly use high value modal operators. Differently, Chinese scenic spot publicity materials tend to use low value modal operators while American scenic spot publicity materials use both kinds very frequently. In person system, American scenic spot publicity materials use much more personal pronouns than Chinese ones, which shows that American scenic spot publicity materials embody stronger human touch than Chinese ones. In specific, Chinese scenic spot publicity materials use the third person pronouns most frequently, especially the third person pronoun “ ? ”, while American scenic spot publicity materials use the second person pronouns most.This thesis is expected to provide new perspective to study the interpersonal meaning of both Chinese and American scenic spot publicity materials. It is also hoped that this thesis will shed some light on the translation of Chinese scenic spot publicity materials.Hopefully, this thesis can contribute to the future study of scenic spot publicity materials.