A Study Of Arthur Miller’s Drama Death Of A Salesman From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Function

Arthur Miller is one of the most important contemporary playwrights in the American literature of the 20 th century. Death of a Salesman is his masterpiece written in 1949, because of which he won himself the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. This drama reveals the flaws of the American dream, and depicts the thespian life of a nonentity, and reflects the conflicts within one family. The means of artistic expression in this drama are also extremely outstanding, in which the stream of consciousness is adopted. Through the description of the failure of father and son, the work negates the “American myth” that everyone can succeed. Moreover, the work makes great achievements in the way of structure arrangement, spatio-temporal processing, image portray and the inner complicated emotion.Language can be served as a tool for people to transfer ideology, exchange information, and express emotions. Therefore, language is always chosen as one of the important research questions by the linguists, for they all believe that there exist some special functions in language. Halliday put forward the three “meta-functions”of language, and Halliday(1978) named them respectively as ideational functions,interpersonal functions and textual functions. Interpersonal functions mean that relationships between people are established and maintained through the process of exchanging information in various appropriate ways. There is not only one way to realize Interpersonal Function. Halliday(2000) points out that Mood and Modality are the two realizations of Interpersonal Function, which is not enough. He(2000:191)further details the substance of meta-functions and puts forward that ‘interpersonal meaning is embodied in the person system, both as pronoun and as possessive.’ Li Zhanzi(2001) also claims that personal pronouns are the factor. For this reason,speech roles, mood, modality, person system are used in analyzing the drama.Three methods are used in this thesis, namely documental research, qualitative research and quantitative research. Documental research is a kind of academic method which includes a great many of materials in some specific field, which is employed in the thesis to help finish the literature review. Qualitative research is performed on the quality of the object, specifically using induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis as well as abstraction, generalization and other methods to obtain a varietyof data in order to understand the essence of things and reveal the inherent law. It is employed to analyze various realizations used in the chosen conversations to reveal the hidden interpersonal meaning. Quantitative research, which aims to make a statistical analysis, is the analysis of quantitative characteristics, quantitative relationships and quantitative changes. It is employed to explore what the occurrence and distribution of different linguistic elements are. And the Qualitative research and Quantitative research work together to explore the different linguistic elements which contribute to the realization of Interpersonal Function and how they can have the contribution to the formation of the relationship between the characters and their personalities.The following questions are to be explored during the whole study in the thesis. 1)What are the occurrence and distribution of interpersonal functions in the drama? 2)What are the realizations of interpersonal functions in the drama? 3) How are the relationship between characters reflected through study and how are the personalities of characters revealed through analysis?The thesis consists of 4 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction part, which includes background of the study, aims and significance of the study, research methods and research questions and organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 is literature review. At the beginning, Halliday’s meta-function, interpersonal function of different linguists and the four ways of realizing interpersonal function will be introduced; then previous studies on interpersonal function, the author Arthur Miller and the drama will be reviewed. Chapter 3 is the main part of the study, which is the study of Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman from the perspective of Interpersonal Function,and through analysis, the relationship between characters will be reflected and the personalities of characters will be revealed. Chapter 4 gives a summary of the major findings, and the limitations and suggestions for further studies will also be given.Through the analysis, the findings are as follows: 1) More Indicative mood are used than other mood types to express the main aim of the conversations of exchanging information; modal operators belonging to median level take the highest percent both in the two groups of conversations; the total number of Personal Pronouns and Vocatives of Willy is higher than that of Linda, but lower than that of Biff. 2) Apart from the common rules of the mood types, these mood types can also realize some special speech functions; Willy intends to adopt more first personal pronouns in the conversation with Linda to show his own ideas and talk about his ownaffairs. But he intends to adopt more second personal pronouns in the conversation with Biff, which expresses that Willy is more likely to talk about Biff’s affairs. 3) The relationship between characters and their personalities change with the time going by.