The Interpersonal Meanings Of Modal Adjuncts And Finite Modal Operators In Wharton's The House Of Mirth

This dissertation attempts to investigate the construction and expressions of the interpersonal meanings of modal adjuncts and finite modal operators in the text of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth from the perspective of interpersonal function in Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. The analysis of interpersonal meanings of modal adjuncts and finite modal operators focus on three respects of Lily and Lawrence's attitudes to marriage, Wharton's attitude to Lily, and the changes of Lily's attitude to Simon and Lawrence's attitude to Lily. This study takes Halliday's interpersonal function and modality system as theoretical frameworks. Examples of these three respects are selected from The House of Mirth. A qualitative and interpretive method, discourse analysis, is applied to analyze these examples. Firstly, Halliday's interpersonal function and modality system are presented. Secondly, modal adjuncts and finite modal operators in those examples are selected and their interpersonal meanings are explained in the relevant discourse. In conclusion, this study analyzes the interpersonal meanings of modal adjuncts and finite modal operators in a new text, Wharton's The House of Mirth. There are implications of comprehending the interpersonal meanings of modal adjuncts and finite modal operators in novel discourse in this study. The results of the analysis are useful for the foreign language learners and teaching. The results can help learners to recognize the relationship between language functions and language forms deeply, which can make novel readers understand the novel deeply by analyzing the interpersonal meanings of modal adjuncts and finite modal operators. Due to this study's limitations of analyzing the interpersonal meanings of only part of modal adjuncts and finite modal operators, the whole novel can not be comprehended completely. The further studies are recommended to investigate the interpersonal meanings of all modal adjuncts and finite modal operators and even all of modal elements systemically, which can help readers to understand the novel better.