An Analysis Of Interpersonal Function Of English Profiles Of World Top Ten Universities

Halliday(1985)insisted in his systemic functional linguistics that language had three innate meanings that revealed the three metafunctions of language in any text: ideational meaning,the representation of empirical reality;interpersonal meaning,social relations in text;and textual meaning,the coherence of text and the way it relates to the context.This metafunction theory enables language to be analyzed from a systemic and functional perspective.The English profile of universities is the main way for the outside world to understand the university.The high standard of English profile can help universities shape the public image,increase their popularity,and attract students from all over the world.In recent years,there have been many studies on English profiles,most of which were on the corporate English profiles,and there were few researches on university's English profiles.This paper intends to analyze the interpersonal function of the English profiles based on the top ten universities in the world,which were published in The Times in 2017,namely,University of Oxford,University of Cambridge,California Institute of Technology,Stanford University,MIT,Harvard University,Princeton University,Imperial College,the University of Chicago,and University of Pennsylvania.The interpersonal function theory,one of the three meta-functions of Halliday's systemic functional grammar,is used to find the realization of the interpersonal function of the top ten universities' English profiles in the world by analyzing the mood and modality system.This paper also appropriately combines the related methods of linguistics for the further study.At the same time,it tries to find out the reasons or motives behind the linguistic form in order to make a more comprehensive and detailed analysis of the realization of the interpersonal function in the English profile of universities.