Transitivity Analysis Of Daisy's Voice And Its Foregrounding Effect In The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, the masterpiece of F. Scott Fitzgerald, gives us a picture of America in the 1920s. The major theme of the novel is the decline of American dream. Through excellent linguistic choices, Fitzgerald tells us a story of a low ranked man, named Gatsby, who wasted his life to win back his lover, Daisy, through the illegal acquisition of riches. Daisy represented the cause of decline of American dream. She is essential to the story and the theme. The writer portrays Daisy as a golden lady with bright and innocent appearance and corrupted innerself through the description of the duality of Daisy's voice---attractive and full of money.In the Systemic-functional Grammar, language is related to social demands that we make on it, to the functions we have to serve. "Language plays a certain part in our lives, that is required to serve certain universal types of demand"(Halliday, 1998: 5). Halliday distinguishes three functions of language: ideational function, interpersonal function, textual function. The focus of the thesis is ideational functional. In ideational function, language serves for the expressions of people's experiences of the real world, including the inner world of his own consciousness. Transitivity is a major grammar system in ideational function. The thesis is first to study stylistic features of language concerning duality of Daisy's voice in Transitivity system. There are two main processes—material process and relational process attributed to Daisy's attractive voice from the dynamic perspective and static perspective. The verbal process is mainly employed in portraying Daisy's money voice.Halliday, from a functional point of view, defines foregrounding as "prominence that is motivated"(Halliday, 1998: 64). A feature that is brought into prominence will be foregrounded only if it relates to the meaning of the text as a whole. And the meaning of the text is motivated by contextual factors which include: Field, Tenor and Mode. In the thesis, the focus will be put on Field in order to study the language features mentioned above. Those language features correspond to the certain Field in the novel and have stylistic value.