INTERPERSONAL MEANING IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE ECONOMIC NEWS REPORTS – A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Tóm tắt

The paper attempts to explore the realization of interpersonal meanings in English and Vietnamese economic news reports from the perspectives of mood system and modality system based on the elaborated framework of Halliday’s model of interpersonal meaning. The study employed a corpus of eighty economic news reports (forty in each language) downloaded from The Reuters and Thoi bao Kinh te Vietnam written within two years now. Combining both qualitative and quantitative analytical methods, the function of mood system and modality system was analyzed in expressing interpersonal meanings. It is found that declarative mood, taking up a predominant proportion, realizes the speech function of information-giving. Modal expressions are seldom seen in the samples and the journalist trends to use low and median values modal operators to express probability, by means of which his attitudes are easy to accept and a solid relationship with the reader is established. High and median values of obligation are applied to show the authority. It is feasible and rewarding to study interpersonal meanings in English and Vietnamese economic news reports from the perspective of functional linguistics. The present study can be instructive for English economic news reports writing and teaching.