A Research Of Characterization In The Scarlet Letter From The Perspective Of Interpersonal Function

Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the most influential American romantic novelists in the 19th century, creates a new era of psychological analysis novels and romantic fiction. His masterpiece The Scarlet Letter has been a long-lasting topic discussed by numerous litterateurs and readers since its publication in 1850, due to its implicit style, the unique technique of expression, the profound thoughts and the original characters with abundant connotation. Above all, the complicated characters portrayed by Hawthorne break the single characterization skill in literary circle at that time and vividly express the contradiction of the Puritan persecution of humanity and their pursuit of happiness. Thus, this novel is recognized as the most outstanding achievement of his career and establishes his position in American literature history.It is a new development of literary criticism to analyze literary works through the application of interpersonal function. Based on the interpersonal function of Systematic Functional Grammar, this thesis attempts to study the characterization in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter from a functional point of view. Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar is an important branch of linguistics. He summarizes the language functions into three metafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Among them, interpersonal function aims to investigate and discuss the relationships between turn-taking selection mark and transforming modes; communication model of people and the subjective judgment ability; individual ideology and the values. In short, it is to study how people establish and maintain relationship with others, affect others'action and convey their views and assessment of the world by the use of language. In the 1990s, Martin further develops interpersonal function and puts forwards Appraisal Theory which studies the speaker's attitude, judgment and assessment.Most of the scholars, both domestic and overseas, have ever applied this theory to analyze interpersonal function of texts. However, the studies are confined to advertising text, science and technology text with short length and the academic discourse. As for the literary texts, many of them do the research from the perspective of textual function for the most part. Besides this, the discussions of the novel The Scarlet Letter are mostly confined to literary field. Therefore, as a starting point, the number and frequency distribution of mood types, modal auxiliaries, modal adjuncts, and evaluation words used by the protagonists in the selected conversations are compared and analyzed in this thesis from the view of Mood System, Modality System and Appraisal System which demonstrate interpersonal meaning. It intends to probe into how the interpersonal function reflects the characters of protagonists and explore the ways in which the stylistic values of these linguistic features delivering interpersonal meaning are achieved, providing a new perspective for the study of literary works.The findings are as follows: 1) the characters'interaction in the dialogue, social status and subtle interpersonal relationship can be vividly reflected through the application of different mood types, speech roles and metaphors of mood; 2) the choice of modal auxiliaries and content modal elements can show the traits of character and the power of solidarity of speakers; 3) the maintenance and adjustment of relationship between participants are obtained by the expression of speakers'attitudes, judgment and assessment through the application of Appraisal System, which is realized by Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.