A Preliminary Investigation Into Projections In Text

We review the study of the speech and thought representation in fictional stylistics, Bakhtin's Dialogism theory, Intertextuality theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systematic and Functional Grammar and Appraisal theory. (Chapter 2) We mainly put our study in the framework of Systematic-Functional Grammar. Within the background of Systematic-Functional Grammar, we attempt to set up a framework of describing the forms of "projection" in text or discourse. We expand the study of projection from one of the logic-semantic relationship of clause complex to interpersonal meaning, and connect it with modality. Arranging the modality in the projected clause from strong to weak, we divide the projections into four types: paratactic projection, hypotactic projection, embedded projection, and extra-clausal projection. These four types of projection form a cline—from the projection from clause to the projection from modal adverbs, which connects transitivity analysis and modality analysis. In addition, we mentioned another type of projection-implicit projection -which the projecting source and verb are hidden in the context of situation, and its mood is also realized in the context. At the end of Chapter 3, we have introduced register theory, which is a preliminary step for our framework. We tentatively set up a theoretical framework from the perspective of constructionist to study the interaction between projections in text and context in which they appear. We consider expansion, projection, transitivity, mood and cohesion as linguistic means of constructing the text and as a whole predicting the context. Focusing on projection, it is used to build a "constructed dialogue" or a "dialogic context" to be precise in the text, but different projections contribute differently to the construction. (Chapter 4) Then, we have chosen three genres: news report, novels, and academic articles as authentic data for analysis. We observe the different conditions of projections used in these genres. The analysis of these situated discourses will show how complex the task of interpreting projection can be and understand better their functions by relating them to specific contexts.The last point is that our method is mainly qualitative and our discussion is mainly at the theoretical level, so the result of our study still needs to be verified in practical analysis by using quantitative or statistic methods.