Analysis Of The Animal Commentary In English Documentary: A Functional Stylistic Perspective

With the arrival of the globalization and information age, English documentary has been developing rapidly. It has been one of the democratic art forms. It always provides the strong audio-visual feelings for the audience. In fact, this is largely due to its sophisticated audio-visual language system. In this system, the commentary plays a predominant role. It helps the filmmaker tell a story that has been created by the visual elements. Meanwhile, it can provide the audience with cues to interpret the information in the documentary. In this way, it is worthwhile to conduct a research on the commentary. Here, studying the animal commentary is my preliminary research.This research attempts to conduct a stylistic analysis on the animal commentary in English documentary from a linguistic perspective. More specifically, we will try to find out the stylistic features from the perspective of Functional Stylistics (FS). Functional Stylistics based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has been proved a scientific and effective theory in stylistic analysis. As shown above, Systemic Functional Linguistics also provides the theoretical framework for the analysis.In this way, this thesis is organized in seven chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to the research, covering the background of the subject, the purpose of the research, the significance of the research, and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two gives the literature review in this field from the style, stylistics, functional stylistics and the present state of the research. Chapter Three provides the theoretical framework of the research, consisting of the theoretical basis and the analytical framework of the research. Chapter Four focuses on the research methodology, and it includes the research idea, the research procedure, the research methods and the language materials. Particularly, "prominence" and "foregrounding" will be stressed, which provide an important reference for this research. In brief, "foregrounding is prominence that is motivated". As for the analysis from the perspective of Functional Stylistics, only the features of "foregrounding" are significant. In this way, in our research, we will find out these prominent features through a comprehensive analysis, then we will relate them to the context of situation and finally summarize these "foregrounded" features. Chapter Five is the analysis. A comprehensive analysis will be conduct at three levels, respectively the discourse semantic level, the grammatical level and the lexical level. Chapter Six is intended to make an interpretation from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Chapter Seven summarizes the major findings of the research, points out the limitations of the research and gives the suggestions for further research.Through the analysis on the animal commentary from the perspective of Functional Stylistics, we find out its stylistic features. During this process, we summarize the rules under these features. As for the animal commentary, its strong dependence on its "image" is revealed. In this sense, its many stylistic features can be recognized as the representation of "the rule". These results of the research can be applied to many related fields, such as the explanation of English documentary, the creation of the commentary, etc. In addition, as far as Functional Stylistics is concerned, to some extent, this research not only proves its feasibility but also broadens its research scope. As previously stated, it really has important theoretical and practical significances.