ABSTRACT
Humans create meanings in action in shared contexts of situation (Halliday 2007 [1984]: 303) by enacting their social roles and relationships in exchanges of information or goods-&- services. Here, the core interpersonal resource with which humans enact the exchanges in their dialogic interaction is the interpersonal system of mood (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014; Matthiessen et al. 2008; Teruya 2007). It is a grammatical system working at clause rank: if a clause is ‘free’, it selects for mood as a realisation of the semantic system of speech function in negotiating the assignment of speech roles and as a realisation of the tenor relationship by calibrating and defining social power and status in speech situations. This chapter is concerned with this negotiation strategy and illustrates how the system of mood in Japanese operates in discourse.
