Comparative Analysis Of Fairy Tales And Short Stories From Transitivity Perspective

Fairy tales play an import role in children's life.It is an unavoidable responsibility for adults to provide more suitable fairy tales for them.As a genre,fairy tales belong to fiction,just as short stories.Fairy tales are undoubtedly for children,while short stories are for adults.It follows that there may be some different stylistic features between fairy tales and short stories.This thesis will carry out part of the stylistic study from the perspective of transitivity system in Halliday's systemic functional grammar.The transitivity system construes the world experience through different types of processes.This thesis uses descriptive and comparative method and concentrates on the analysis of 5 fairy tales and 5 short stories from the perspective of transitivity system to explore stylistic features of English Fairy tales and what kind of fairy tales are suitable for children.The first step of this analysis is to identify process types in 5 fairy tales and 5 short stories respectively.After analyzing the process types,their frequency distribution of the process types are made clear.And then each process types in fairy tales and short stories are studied in detail.Finally comparison was made between the transitivity features of fairy tales and short stories to see whether the prominent features in fairy tales are foungrounded.According to the analyzing results,it is found that there are more material process and less mental and relational process in fairy tales than in short stories.As far as material process is concerned,the actors in fairy tales are more influential to their goals in fairy tales than in short stories.As far as mental process is concerned,there are more perceptional mental processes and less cognitional and affective mental processes in fairy tales.The verbal words of mental processes in fairy tales are frequently-used and easy-to-understand words while the verbal words of mental process in short stories are complex and various.As far as relational process is concemed,there are more identifying relational processes in fairy tales.In intensive relational process,there are more relational processes expressing emotion in fairy tales than in short stories.All of these form the stylistic features of fairy tales from transitivity perspective and these features,proved from the psychological perspective,are suitable for children and makes fairy tales easy to understand for children.This study theoretically tries to enrich the research on fairy tales and short stories as genres and practically tries to explore what kind of fairy tales are suitable for children. The author of the present thesis hopes that her tentative study may help child educators and writers work more scientifically and effectively in the teaching of children and producing more of children's fiction respectively.