Study On Transitivity Of Adjective Structures And Its Interpersonal Meaning

Systemic Functional Linguistics holds that language has three basic and major functions named 'metafunctions', i.e. ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. Transitivity is one important semantic system representing the ideational metafunction and dividing the experience into six processes. Interpersonal meaning refers to the interaction between speaker and listener in the discourse or text. The matafunction is aimed to establish and maintain the interpersonal relationship, indicating the speaker's identity, position, motivation and attitude. Halliday views that meaning can be realized by comparatively congruent form or comparatively metaphorical form at lexical-grammatical level. The term 'congruent' means that a verb is to encode a process, a noun is to encode a thing or a person and an adjective is to encode quality or status. The term 'metaphorical' means that rank shifting, alternation of functional components and even the transference of transitive processes can be realized through projection of grammatical categories. In the research on the grammatical metaphor, Halliday mainly discusses the nominalization, while it is left untouched that the ideational and interpersonal metaphors are realized by the dynamic projection and interaction between other categories.Traditionally, adjectives are common and static category used to describe person or thing. Zhang Bojing and Given (1979,1978) establishes organic system 'nouns-adjectives-verbs' indicating that adjectives can transfer between nouns and verbs, nevertheless the dynamic mechanism of the system is not clearly construed, though merely with some grammatical instances. Therefore, from the perspective as the breakthrough, adjectives and their structures are demonstrated to possess the dynamic semantic and grammatical features and have the potentiality to verbalization in the thesis. Based on the analysis of the English and Chinese adjective structures in original language material, the thesis finds that adjective structures play active roles in the text and possess the potentiality to dynamic verbalization, not only describing the quality and state, but representing dynamic temporal process. Furthermore, the thesis probes into the transitivity of adjective structures through metaphor, then dynamically construes the mechanism of realization of transitivity by adjective structures, i.e. interpersonal meaning and therefore offers an effective approach to the multidimensional interaction between ideational and interpersonal meanings.The structure of the thesis includes: the introduction; the theoretical foundation of the research; the transitivity of adjective structures; the interpersonal meaning of adjective structures within transitivity; the application of the adjective structures in different styles and the conclusion. It is a breakthrough and creation to study transitivity and the interaction between it and interpersonal meaning from the aspect of dynamic adjective structures. This thesis will make certain contribution to promoting the study on transitivity from a new approach, perfecting the Systemic Functional Linguistics and will provide a reference for other research who are interested in the study.