Attitude System-based Analysisi Of Darcy’s Personalities In Pride And Prejudice

Since published, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been considered one of themost popular novels of the19thcentury in Britain. Many scholars at home and abroad haveanalyzed this novel from various perspectives. However, few researchers make an attemptto explore hero Darcy’s personalities on the basis of Attitude system. Therefore, thepresent research will employ three sub-systems of the attitudinal resources-affect,judgment and appreciation to make a tentative analysis of hero Darcy’s personalities.The Appraisal theory is the development and complement of the interpersonalmeaning in Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics. The Attitude system, which is oneof the three sub-systems of the Appraisal theory, is put forward by J.R. Martin in the1990s.Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments ofbehaviour and evaluation of things (Martin,2005). It is sub-divided into three regions offeeling-affect, judgment and appreciation, which covers what is traditionally referred asemotion, ethics and aesthetics. Many scholars have done many researches based onAppraisal theory at home and abroad. Susan Hood (2004) made Appraisal theory–basedanalysis of academic discourse. Wang Zhenhua (2004) employed Attitude system to carryout the analysis of hard news. Li Rongjuan (2005) applied Appraisal theory to exploreattitudinal meanings of English political column texts. Shan Huifang and Ding Suping(2006) did researches on famous fairytale-The Ugly Duckling from the perspective ofAppraisal theory. However, there is not yet sufficient study on Attitude system-basedanalysis of characters’ personalities. The present research will conduct a detailed analysisof how hero Darcy’s personalities are portrayed through the use of various attitudinalresources in the novel within the framework of affect, judgment and appreciation underAttitude system. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the attitudinal resources willbe made to depict hero Darcy’s personalities. Darcy’s personalities have been summed up from two aspects. On the one hand,although Darcy is a well-educated gentleman, he is proud, arrogant, conceited,self-esteemed, haughty and fastidious. On the other hand, though Darcy seems to be proudin appearance, he is kind by nature. He is liberal, generous, candid, honest, kind-hearted,amiable and friendly.Data analysis reveals the following findings.(1)Abundant and various attitudinal resources (168) are applied in this novel. Andthey interact with each other so as to depict the different aspects of hero Darcy’spersonalities such as proud, arrogant or kind-hearted.(2)Within the Attitude system, the judgment resources occupy the highest frequency(69.1%), which shows that Jane Austen manages to find out hero Darcy’s personalitiesthrough keen and close observation and judgment of his behaviors and manners, the affectresources the second (29.8%), and the appreciation resources the lowest (1.1%). Moreover,Jane Austen displays the tendency to employ the negative attitudinal resources to createthe negative image of hero Darcy. Among all the attitudinal resources (168),127fall intothe category of the negative ones, taking up a percentage of75.6%.(3)Jane Austen prefers to use nominalization to confirm and reconfirm that thenegative sides of hero Darcy’s personalities, which indirectly reflects her personalattitudes towards Darcy. In addition, Jane Austen is inclined to employ emotionaladjectives, affective verbs as well as repetition to portray hero Darcy’s personalities.The research not only provides a new perspective to appreciate the linguisticfeatures as well as the characters’ personalities, but also supplies some importantimplications for the teaching of the literal works in the future.