A Systemic-Functional Approach To The Stylistic Study Of Maritime English Discourse

Style has always been an issue received much attention,mainly concerning the relationship between form and meaning,the methodologies and the factors which have an influence on style.In recent years,with Halliday's functional grammar further explored and applied to a variety of fields of stylistics,Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) provides an efficient approach for discourse analysis.This thesis will make a tentative endeavor to apply the SFG approach for a comprehensive survey of Maritime English discourse.A Maritime English(ME) corpus is built,in which all the materials are downloaded from the official website of the International Maritime Organization.10 samples are selected from the ME corpus for manual studies.By means of the quantitative and qualitative analysis,the author makes a detailed analysis around the three metafuntions(ideational,interpersonal and textual).The analysis is given to the choices of linguistic elements at the lexico-grammatical level,such as transitivity and voice,mood and modality,theme structure and thematic progression.In addition,it explains how the three variables of the context of situation(field,tenor and mode) activate the functional components in the semantics.The result shows that in the study of ideational metafunction,material process is employed at the highest rate,and relational process and verbal process also appear with a high frequency.In terms of voice analysis,active voice is more than passive voice.In interpersonal metafunction study,declarative mood plays the predominant role,and the frequency of modality in ME discourses is low.In the study of textual metafunction, unmarked Themes account for more than marked ones,and Parallel Thematic Progression is used most for the organization of ME discourses.The conclusion is that through the study of Systemic-Functional Grammar in Maritime English discourses,the writer may consciously use proper devices to interact successfully with the reader;it also can make the readers' understanding more comprehensible.