An Analysis Of The Language Feature Of The Film A Beautiful Mind From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Meaning

Films are one of the most influential media nowadays; one film cannot be so popular without the excellent use of language. Through Systemic Functional Grammar, this thesis aims at the analysis of the dialogues in the film A Beautiful Mind with its theoretical background of one of Halliday's three metafunctions, that is interpersonal metafunction. Systemic Functional linguist Halliday classifies all the language functions as three metafunctions– ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The interpersonal function not only embodies the speaker's identity and status, but also shows his attitude, motivation or inference to the surroundings. The interpersonal meaning refers to the meaning that reflects the nature of the interpersonal relationship among those who are using the language. In Halliday's theoretical framework, mood, modality and key are the main means to realize the interpersonal meaning. The realization of interpersonal meaning from mood and modality is rested on the lexical grammatical level. While Martin and White further developed Halliday's theory and established the appraisal theory in their book. This thesis analyzes the interpersonal meaning of the film A Beautiful Mind from the perspectives of mood, modality and appraisal system.At the awarding ceremony of Oscar in 2002, the film A Beautiful Mind achieved four awards, including the award of Best Picture. It almost achieved all the world's top class awards of films in 2002. The success of this film has a close relationship with its proper use of language. This thesis aims at analyzing the dialogues in the film from the perspective of functional grammar so as to reveal the personalities of the characters, their mental states and their relationship with each other. In this way, we could have a better understanding of the film and further reveal the reason for the success of the film and even uncover the theme of the film– it is only love that could stop the feeling of loneliness. In the film, the leading character Nash is in a lonely situation despite of his enormous intelligence. The beautiful ending of the film shows us that our hero successfully stops the feeling of loneliness. Thus, the theme of the film is sublimated.This thesis analyzes the dialogues in the film from the perspective of interpersonal meaning. The major findings of the study are listed as follows:First, the analysis of interpersonal meaning realized through mood system shows that different choices of mood and sentence patterns are helpful to the description of the characters'personalities. Young Nash is not good at talking with others while his imaginary roommate is different from him in personality. In the dialogue, Charles leads the conversation and cares about Nash, while Nash, on the other hand, tends to use minor clauses at the beginning which shows his carelessness and abstraction. But gradually, he changes to use complete clauses and the number of clauses uttered by him increases, which indicates that he takes an active role in the conversation and regards Charles as a friend of his. All these suggest that deep in Nash's heart, he longs for others'confirmation, and for getting others'support and understanding.Second, the analysis of interpersonal meaning realized through modality system shows that the choices of modal operators, modal adjuncts and modal clauses are in accordance with the protagonists'personalities and the development of the plot.Third, the analysis of interpersonal meaning through appraisal system reveals the characters'emotions, psychology and attitudes towards each other. The attitudinal terms used by Alicia and Nash show their deep love for each other.This thesis analyzes the dialogues in the film from the perspective of interpersonal meaning so as to further reveal the characters'personalities, psychology, their relationship with each other and the development of the plot. The study also shows that the analysis of interpersonal meaning is helpful for us to better understand and appreciate the film and the characters. In a word, this thesis proves that the appliance of SFG to actual materials is highly effective and scientific.