Re-evaluation Of Social-semiotic, Linguistic-semantic And Literary-Psychological Stylistics

This MA thesis is a tentative study on Professor Liu Shisheng's Social-semiotic, Linguistic-semantic, and Literary-psychological Stylistics. It tries to re-evaluate this stylistic model on the relationships between the three systems and further proposes a different approach to apply this stylistic model to the analysis of a special kind of literary work—fairy tales. After a detailed analysis of three most outstanding fairy tales in English world by employing a collaborated qualitative and quantitative method, the applicability of the three newly-raised sub-models can be proved:1. Ideational-Image-Field Sub-Model2. Interpersonal-Emotion-Tenor Sub-Model3. Textual-Motif-Mode Sub-ModelDifferent from previous application of the model, this thesis follows the three sub-models which are composed of three related elements from each system. Therefore, these three systems are inter-related; and inter-influencing in the analyzing process instead of rigidly trying to find their relationship after application. This thesis also changes the sequence of the three systems employed by readers to interpret a fairy tale into: Linguistic-semantic, Literary-psychological, and Social-semiotic Stylistics.The organization of the whole thesis is as follows: it is composed of four chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter One is literature review. Chapter Two is a theoretical framework focusing on the three systems of Liu's model. Chapter Three is the application of Liu's model from a new angle. Following the three sub-models, it tries to analyze the three fairy tales with emphasis on the relationship between Linguistic-semantic system and Literary-psychological system. Chapter Four is a further valuation of the three sub-models used in Chapter Three, and it proves the applicability of the three sub-models. Lastly, the sequence problem is solved by placing literary-psychological system in the middle. In addition, a minor problem concerning emotion in Liu's model is discussed. What inspired me to think about the three sub-models is fairy tale, this special literary work. Because of the lack of related knowledge and experiences, children can not fully interpret the meaning endowed in a fairy tale, for example, what the world looks like, what is right and what is wrong, how should we behave in society, and what attitudes or feelings we should have to others. Therefore, the literary-psychological system is of utmost importance in the interpretation of fairy tales. It functions as a bridge linking linguistic-semantic system and social-semiotic system. After reading or listening to a fairy tale, it is hard for children to immediately connect the characters depicted with the actual ones in society, but they can have a general image, a certain emotion, and an overall motif in their mind. And with accumulating of knowledge, frequent contact with the outside world, and gradual maturity of cognitive mechanisms afterwards, they will find the prototypes of the former images, emotions, or motifs. Considering readers'interpretation sequence, the model needs to be adjusted to Linguistic-semantic, Literary-psychological, Social-semiotic Stylistics.This thesis further develops professor Liu's model, and makes it more applicable to the analysis of fairy tales. In the analyzing process (Chapter Three), three typical and widely read fairy tales in English world are chosen to test this model. Since this thesis takes stylistic model as its center, qualitative methodology is the major research method. Quantitative methodology is also adopted, as some linguistic features are shown through statistic analysis. In the discussion part (Chapter Four), based on the application in Chapter Three, it further proves the three sub-models'applicability assisted by some basic theories from cognitive linguistics.This thesis provides a new angle of applying Liu's model to practical analysis, and makes it more applicable to fairy tale, a special kind of literary work.