A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In The Daughters Of The Late Colonel

Language,as a vehicle of communication,can be organized to represent an interactive event involving speaker,or writer and audience in both speech situations and written discourse.This function of language in the communicative exchange of meanings is referred to as the interpersonal metafunction.Interpersonal meaning comes from interpersonal function of language,which is one component in the notion of metafunction in Halliday's systemic functional grammar.The study of interpersonal meaning is undoubtedly a useful tool to make a discourse analysis,including interpreting literary works.It could make readers focus their attention on the social nature and contextual aspects of the literary works.Thus,it could open a new way to achieve a better understanding and appreciation of literary works.The purpose of the thesis is to probe into the interpersonal meaning of the short story The Daughters of the Late Colonel in the framework of Halliday's three metafunctions.In his functional model,Halliday separates out three metafunctions of language and identifies in the clause structure distinct linguistic resources that realize the three metafunctions respectively.In Hallidayan tradition,interpersonal function is mainly realized by mood system,modality system,attitudinal epithets,comment adjuncts, vocatives etc.which are located in discourse non-discretely.Starting out from this prosodic feature of interpersonal meaning,Li Zhanzi(2002) expands Hallidayan model of interpersonal meaning by discovering more linguistic devices which contribute to the realization of interpersonal meaning.She further proposes a viewpoint that in a discourse the linguistic devices that help realize the three metafunctions can be overlapped;in other words,some devices can simultaneously realize two metafunctions.Enlightened by Li's work,the present study does not constrain itself in Halliday's traditional approach to interpersonal meaning in terms of mood and modality,but also it sets out a tentative exploration of interpersonal meaning into other means which are typically correlated with ideational function and textual function.The present study takes Katherine Mansfield's novella The Daughters of the Late Colonel as corpus.Quantitative and descriptive approaches will be combined to analyze the discourse.It explores the various means of realizing interpersonal meaning from four aspects,namely,mood system,modality system,transitivity system and cohesion system.By examining interpersonal meaning in our target discourse from the above four aspects,the present study demonstrates the close relationship between interpersonal meaning of language and various lexico-grammatical resources.The traditional mood and modality resources undoubtedly convey a lot in terms of the daughters' personality traits and their relationship with father.In her choices of transitivity system,Mansfield makes use of prominence and contrasts to reveal the daughters' distinct personality profile and their relationship with others under the pervasive influence of their father.Through different cohesive devices,Mansfield also successfully negotiates with her reader to convey its thematic meaning.The present study confirms the feasibility of the systemic-functional grammar in literary discourse analysis and widens our scope of study on realizations of interpersonal meaning.My attempt to explore the interpersonal meaning into language resources related with three metafunctions is at most a tentative one.Some aspects in each metafunction are left unstudied.Future studies can be perfected in this regard so as to further testify the overlapping of the linguistic devices that help realize the three metafunctions.