A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies is an allegorical novel by Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding. It discusses how culture created by man fails, using as an example of a group of British schoolboys stuck on a desert island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. This thesis tries to analyze the interpersonal meaning in it from the perspective of systemic functional grammar.Interpersonal meaning can reflect the nature of interpersonal communication through language. Halliday distinguishes three metafunctions in his systemic functional grammar (SFG) and identifies in the clause level distinct linguistic resources that realize the three metafunctions respectively. In Hallidayan tradition, interpersonal meaning is mainly realized by mood system, modality system, adjuncts, etc.Systemic functional stylistics (SFS) relying on SFG has flourished ever since the early 1970s. It not only broadens the view and scope of stylistic studies, but also stresses the relationship between language, text and context of situation. SFS considers style as"motivated prominence". If a prominent language feature is connected with the theme of the work as a whole, it can be seen as"motivated prominence". Though many scholars home and abroad have done studies on literary works in the perspective of function, most of them adopt the transitivity system in ideational function as their analytical tool neglecting interpersonal function which should be equally important in the text.Lord of the Flies is Golding's first novel and the most popular one. Numerous researchers have studied it from different aspects, such as literary critics, narratology,etc. However, none of them has studied it from the angle of SFS. This thesis intends to make a more objective and comprehensive study on it by drawing on the theories of foregrounding, criteria of relevance, and interpersonal meaning from Hallidayan SFG so as to find out how interpersonal meaning contributes to the expression of the theme of the whole novel, how the language features reflecting interpersonal meaning realize their stylistic values and the inspiration it can give to literature teaching. This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter gives a general introduction to the whole thesis and states the necessity of doing this study. It also clarifies the aims, significance and organization of this thesis. Chapter two presents an overview of style and stylistics, esp. systemic functional stylistics and the three metafunctions of it. It provides a brief introduction to the novel, Lord of the Flies and a general survey of the researches done on it home and abroad. The analyzing methodology adopted in this thesis is also included in this part. Chapter three is concerned with the detailed description of the mood and modality system and situational context which contribute to the realization of interpersonal meaning. Chapter four analyzes the context of the novel and applies mood and modality system to the analysis of excerpts from the novel. Chapter five offers a conclusion to the whole thesis.It is found that Hallidayan interpersonal meaning is very helpful in displaying the roles of interactants and their relationships and revealing the author's style. This thesis limits itself to mood and modality system in exploring the interpersonal meaning in the novel, so further studies can be perfected in this aspect so as to testify the overlapping of the linguistic devices that help to realize the three metafucntions.