A Systemic Functional Analysis Of "a Sunrise On The Veld"

This thesis adopts the systemic functional approach towards the analysis of the British female writer Doris Lessing's story"A Sunrise on the Veld". The school of systemic functional linguistics views language as a social product. Language is one of the realizations of culture. The relationship between language and text is that of general and specific. The analysis towards specific texts is an important way to understand the culture. Among various systemic functional perspectives, the focus of the thesis will be on the transitivity analysis and the thematic analysis of the story. By adopting the systemic functional approach, the subject matter of the story is revealed that man is tiny among other creatures and that nature has its own will which can be altered by people on no account. Meanwhile, it proves that the linguistic patterns are interwoven with their embedded functional meanings.