An Interpersonal Function Analysis Of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four

George Orwell is a very famous English novelist who not only creates literarycriticism and poetry but also fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for thedystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the allegorical novella Animal Farm. He isconsidered as the best writer who combines novel writing and political ideas in the20thcentury. Orwell, as his contemporaries, is a distinctive political writer. He gives weightto the political concerns in his works, and he is called “the wintry conscience of ageneration.”In the West, the studies on this novel can be dated back to the1950s, and werefocused on the author and his political ideas; while in China, the studies showed upafter China’s reform and opening-up in1979, and were focused on its theme andtranslation. However, with the change of the world order, some new perspective havebeen adopted to analyze the novel in recent years, such as literariness, feminism,negative effects of science and technology, post-colonialism and so on. But fewanalyses have been done from the aspect of linguistics, not to mention from SystemicFunctional Linguistics(SFL hereafter). So within the theoretical foundation ofInterpersonal Funtion in SFL, this thesis adopts qualitative and quantitative approachesfrom the perpestive of mood system, modality system and personal pronouns to give ananalysis of the dialogue between Winston and Syme and the dialogue between Winstonand O’Brien.The analysis shows that: first, from the mood system, Winston, Syme andO’Brien’s inner world and mental changes are well realized by different types ofclauses, mood adjuncts and comment adjuncts; second, from the modality system,Winston’s helplessness, Syme’s fanaticism for “the Newspeak” and O’Brien’s loyaltyto totalitarianism are recognized by the modal operators they used; third, from thepersonal pronouns, the sharp difference of these three characters’ power are revealed bytheir most frequent subject choice.