A Systemic-Functional Stylistic Approach To The Characteristics Of English Science Readings

Functional stylistics is a discipline which takes Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar as its theoretical basis. In recent years, relying on its relatively complete theoretical foundation and analyzing system, functional stylistics has shown great vitality in development among numerous branches of modern stylistics.In this thesis, in the analytical framework of three metafunctions of language, a manual study is carried out. and for the sake of authority and integrity of the data, all the7samples are selected from one book called English for Night Reading--to Roam in Science, published by Shanghai Yiwen Press, a press with a high reputation in China for publishing and translating original foreign works. By means of quantitative and qualitative methods and around the three metafunctions of language (ideational. interpersonal and textual), this manual study aims to analyze the selected linguistic elements at the lexico-grammatical level, such as transitivity, voice, mood and modality, thematic structure and thematic progression. In addition, it also states how writers make semantic choices from the linguistic system under the restriction of three variables of the context of situation (field, tenor and mode).The results have shown that with the help of SFG. on the one hand, the writer may adopt more proper devices to make interactions with his readers:and on the other hand, readers may have an access to a more comprehensive understanding of texts.