A Study Of Breaking Dawn Of Twilight Saga From The Perspective Of Register Theory

As the second most popular female writer in the present decade, Stephenie Meyer not only drives the teenagers all over the world into a craze for mysterious vampire legends but she also earns herself tremendous credits and as much criticism and suspicions as the honours she receives. How could such a succession of popular fictions hit the book shelf over night? What on earth fantastic attractions are embedded in her Twilight series? From the debut Twilight to the finale Breaking Dawn, every volume has triggered a heated dispute. More discussions on this series of novels from scholars focus on the literature analysis, and this thesis attempts to look into the subject matter, characteristics of the protagonists, the relationship between characters and the vehicles Stephenie Meyer take advantage of in her writing in light of the register theory.After the contribution of Bronislaw Malinowski and J.R. Firth, Register theory was put forward by Halliday and has been working as a vital systemic functional theory to play its part in expounding contexts of situation in the novel. In his viewpoint, Halliday categories such variables of registers which makes the registers vary with their alteration as field, tenor and mode. Field refers to what is happening, what is the whole setting of relevant actions and events, which is actually going on. In Breaking Dawn, the field focuses on the romance and unique love story between Bella and Edward Cullen, the secular vampire and with no doubt the environment where all the activities occur should also be taken into consideration. Tenor displays what is related to the participants, their statuses and roles included. In this fiction, I mainly concentrate my study on the characteristics of several figures and their relationships. And mode, or mode of discourse signifies what part the language is playing and what the participants are expecting the language to do from them in that situation. To be specific in the case of Breaking Dawn, its mode is the written form, dialogues and monologues. Drawing on the register theory by Halliday, this thesis would like to disclose the innumerous connotations implied underneath Meyer’s concise and down-to-earth words and the first person narration in her works. Themed by the vampire-werewolf legend and intertwined romance, Breaking Dawn not only unfolds the triangle relationship between the protagonists but it also demonstrates the parental love and fraternal love in a broader sense. Bella’s independence and toughness, Alice’s warm heart as well as her carefulness to friends and family members and features of other characters as well as their relationships shown in this novel are all given a detailed analysis to some extent.