Functional And Pragmatic Studies Of Wilde’s Language In Fairy Tales

Oscar Wilde, the outstanding author of aestheticism, was also a controversial playwright and poet. A gracious father of his children and the melancholy prince of the fairy tale world, he only wrote nine fairy tales all his life, which were all distinctive, to bring fresh vitality to the literature of Victorian Age. Once published, his fairy tales created a public sensation. Before long it attracted scholars’attention at home and abroad. At present, the research perspective on Wilde’s fairy tales has been increasing gradually, but few has adopted from the perspective of systemic functional grammar coordinated with pragmatics.Systemic functional grammar regards language as a system with meaning potential, the literary language being no exception. A literature text can be analyzed from the three aspects: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, which makes a more comprehensive interpretation for the characteristics of literary texts. In the meantime, it reveals that how language builds different images successfully, the relationship among the characters and the development of the plot, etc. As an interdisciplinary linguistics, pragmatics offers a powerful theoretical tool for literary analysis. It regards the literary text reception as a dynamic process, and as the product of the interaction among the writer, reader and context. This thesis adopts a pragmatic perspective to analyze the "functional" literature texts, which will enhance the interpretative ability to literary language. Systemic functional grammar and pragmatics are complementary to each other, with the combination of the two showing more practical significance for the interpretation of literary texts.The thesis takes Wilde’s five fairy tales as the analytical texts based on the systemic functional grammar and pragmatics, it is seen clearly that the approach not only applies to the common types of literary works, but also is appropriate for the analysis of fairy tales. The transitivity processes reveal the characters’psychological changes and the plot development; the mood and modality system reveal the relationship between the characters; the thematic structure reflect what concepts the speaker wants to focus on, in this way, the readers can experience the characters’many changes. In the meantime, cooperative principle and its maxims are applied to analyze the dialogues in the texts, which can help the readers understand the characterization and various kinds of conflicts effectively. Through analyzing the distribution of the turns and turn-taking strategies, it reveals the characterization and the relationship between the characters. Therefore, the readers can grasp the author’s writing style and aesthetic value completely. The present research enriches and develops the application of systemic functional grammar and pragmatics; meanwhile, it is significant for further studies, the teaching of fairy tales and the translation of similar literary discourse.