Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Chapter Nineteen Of Pride And Prejudice

As two main approaches to analyzing literary works, literary criticism and stylistic analysis have been adopted for a long period of time. However, in practice no stylistic method has been proved to be effective up till now. Functional Stylistics, based on Systemic Functional Grammar, has gained wide popularity from the 1970s, which can be ascribed to these reasons: a) it extends stylistic study to "content" ignored by stylists in other schools, which helps display the nature of the characters' living activities and their outlook; b) it stresses the relationship among language, text and context of situation; c) it is systematic. Functional Stylistics considers style as "motivated prominence", which means the unexpected patterns, once relevant to the whole meaning of the text, can be regarded as "motivated prominence". According to Halliday, prominence can be regarded as either "attainment of a norm" or "departure of a norm", with the former being favored by him. Nevertheless, the author considers that both "attainment of a norm" and "departure of a norm", as long as relevant to the whole meaning of the text, can be regarded as stylistic features. The preceding functional stylistic analysis has been restricted to one item of the lexico-grammatical layer. And there are far fewer papers that analyze classical works from functional stylistic perspective. Therefore attempts on this area seem of great significance. This thesis extends its analysis to more than one layer at the lexico-grammatical layer-transitivity, mood, modality, modulation, thematic structure, etc. By investigating in chapter nineteen of Pride and Prejudice, the author tends to prove that both "attainment of a norm" and "departure of a norm" can be regarded as "motivated prominence" and that Systemic-Functional Grammar is of great value in practice and operation; hence it can be an effective approach to analyzing literary works. Meanwhile, this thesis aims to reach a better understanding and fuller appreciation of the fantastic literary work.