An Exploration Of Adjuncts In The Teahouse

Halliday states that an adjunct is an element that has not got the potential of being Subject. It is typically realized by an adverbial group or a prepositional phrase. Adjuncts were first investigated by traditional grammarians. Later they interested many structural grammarians. Since the late1960s the study of adjuncts has always been a hot topic for syntactic linguists. With the development of the theories of linguistics, more and more attention has been paid to the study of adjuncts in English, Chinese and other languages. In these decades, researchers in the field of systemic functional linguistics have studied the subject in some aspects.Viewed in traditional grammar and generative grammar, adjuncts are referred to as adverbials. Chomsky points out:"Adverbials are a rich and as yet relatively unexplored system, and therefore anything we say about them must be regarded as quite tentative." However, during the years after that, the situation has not changed a lot. This study, within the framework of systemic functional linguistics and the theory of discourse semantics and based on the data taken from Lao She’s renowned play The Teahouse, endeavors to investigate the distribution of different types of adjuncts, their realization and the set of functions that is construed as adjuncts in Chinese texts.Adjuncts consist of three types, namely circumstantial adjuncts, modal adjuncts and conjunctive adjuncts. They are associated with the three metafunctions:ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunction respectively.The results of the study indicate that as a whole, circumstantial adjuncts do not occur as frequently as modal adjuncts in the Chinese text. Conjunctive adjuncts occur least frequently in the play. The study, moreover, reveals the realization and the set of functions that is construed as adjuncts in Chinese texts.Circumstances, or rather circumstantial adjuncts are viewed minor processes, and there are also two types of logico-semantic relations between circumstantial adjuncts and the processes that they are associated with:expansion and projection, through which the meanings of the process and participants are developed or expanded. Expansion occurs far more frequently than projection because expansion relates phenomena as being of the same order of experience and construes a more direct representation of a (linguistic) experience than projection, which makes the play easy to understand and perform. In the expansion relation, enhancing occurs most frequently, extending comes next and elaborating appears the least frequently. Enhancing is mainly manifested in the form of location which occurs most as place. And in extending, accompaniment appears mainly in the form of comitative. Moreover, in elaborating, role is in the major form of guise. While in the projection relation, matter occurs most frequently. Besides, it also shows circumstantial adjuncts can not only be realized by the adverbial groups or prepositional phrases but also nouns and finite clauses in Chinese texts. In The Teahouse, place adjuncts often go with the material, behavioral, verbal and existential process, while time adjuncts often go with the mental and relational process. And some circumstantial adjuncts in The Teahouse are, in some extent, obligatory in the meaning development of the process and complete the meanings of the process and participants.As far as modal adjuncts are concerned, mood adjuncts occur more frequently than comment adjuncts in The Teahouse. Mood adjuncts are linked to modality which enriches the speaker’s meaning through the alternative forms of expression; while comment adjuncts come to express speakers’attitudes to the proposition either as a whole or on the part. Interpersonal function is added or expressed by means of mood and comment adjuncts and their subcategories. Besides, except for adverbs, modal adjuncts can be realized by adjectives, pronouns, numerals and nouns in The Teahouse.As to conjunctive adjuncts, adversatives occur most frequently in the play. By means of extension, adversatives add the adversative meaning to the clauses and extend the textual function. Conditional, temporal and causal conjunctive adjuncts enlarge the textual meaning through enhancement. And appositive and summative develop the textual function by elaboration. Conjunctive adjuncts are mainly realized by adverbs and nouns in the Chinese text The Teahouse. In addition, the connection of conjunctive adjuncts with thematic structure and information structure may result in different textual functions in different positions in Chinese texts.The present study is expected to be of both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, this study is conducted within the framework of SFL, which provides evidence for the feasibility of the systemic functional approach to discourses in Chinese context. Practically, the results of this study reveal how the set of functions is construed as different types of adjuncts in discourse, which is advantageous to the improvement of cross-cultural communication and language teaching.