A Cognitive Interpretation Of Transitivity System Based On An Analysis Of D.H. Lawrence's 'Odour Of Chrysanthemums'

Functional grammar and cognitive linguistics are the two main schools of modern linguistics, the former attaches great importance to the sociological aspects of language while the latter pays much attention to the cognitive aspect of language. But they have a lot in common, for example, their negative attitude towards formalism and TG grammar, their concern about semantics and context, and above all, their belief of language as human representation of the world or reality. And it also becomes increasingly clear that both functional grammar and cognitive linguistics are appealing to cognition in their efforts to account for language. This is the most important converging point of functional grammar and cognitive grammar.An overall comparison between functional grammar and cognitive linguistics is too ambitious for a thesis of this length. So we narrowed it down and tried to give a tentative cognitive interpretation of the transitivity system. More specifically, this thesis intends to interpret transitivity system from a cognitive perspective with an illustrative analysis of D.H. Lawrence's short story-Odour of Chrysanthemums. Our purpose is to see whether it is more illuminating to interpret literary discourse from both a functional perspective and a cognitive one.