Interpersonal Meaning By Modality System In Hawkes’ The Story Of The Stone

Language is a tool for social interaction and meaningful activities of the social beings,so language is communicative in nature. Halliday thought that language possesses threemetafunctions namely ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.Interpersonal function is concerned with interaction between the addresser and addresseein a discourse situation and the addresser’s attitude toward what he speaks or writes about.In short, it is interactional and attitudinal (Hu,2002:23). Interpersonal meaning is realizedby interpersonal function whose main realization methods include mood, modality andappraisal. Through the efforts made by previous uncountable theorists we can know that intranslation to cross-culturally construct the interpersonal meaning, besides the restriction ofinterrelationship between each character and contextual situation taken into consideration,it also involves the relationship of the writer, translator and reader.Based on interpersonal function theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) ofHalliday this thesis attempts to analyze the dialogues sampled from Hongloumeng and itsEnglish-translated version The story of the Stone by Hawkes involving interpersonalmeaning by modality system to demonstrate how the modality system realize theconstruction of interpersonal meaning in The Story of the Stone when taking intoconsideration of the three subjects: the writer of the source text, the translator and thereader of the target text. Furthermore, this thesis is to explore the differences ofinterpersonal meaning existing in the source text and the target text, appreciate the choiceof modality system by the translator during the translation course and to make translatorrealize the relationship among the writer, translator and the reader in the translationpractice to get better translated text. In this thesis, text analysis is the main research methodwhere through analyzing the typical dialogues in the source text and their translated ones,the interpersonal meaning constructing methods in The Story of the Stone are appreciated.In this thesis the text analysis shows that Hawkes took three steps during theinterpersonal meaning construction process. First is to identify the interpersonal meaningexpressed in the source text; second is to consider all factors that must be considered suchas background, characters’ attitudes, context and so on; third is to choose proper languagedevices to convey the interpersonal meaning in the source text. Simultaneously, thisanalysis indicates that the interpersonal meaning constructed by Hawkes is basicallyequivalent to that in the source text.