A Study Of The Secret Garden From The Perspective Of International Function

Frances Hodgson Burnett is famous for children`s literature, especially for Secret Gardenwhich made her among the best authors in the twentieth century. The Secret Garden isredacted to the "World Classic Series” as a serious literary work, and it was adapted forTV play, film, animation and drama by other countries such as the United States and theUnited Kingdom, which has laid an important position for Burnett in the field of children’sliterature. Scholars both at home and abroad have studied the novel from many respects suchas feminist, ecologicalism, realism, gothic elements and so on.The Interpersonal analysis of literary is a new development of literary criticism.Interpersonal metafunction is explained by Halliday as the function of negotioation, theexchange between the addresser and addressee, the function of expressing the addresser`sstance, opinion, judgment etc so as to establish and maintain appropriate social relationshipsbetween two partners. While Martin further developed Halliday`s theory and established theAppraisal Theory in the nineteen nineties.Many scholars at home and abroad have applied the theory to analyze the text, but onlylimited in the advertising discourse, legal discourse, speech discourse, classroom discourseand so on. In addition, the study of "The Secret Garden" is mostly limited to the field ofliterature. Therefore, this paper analyzes the conversations from the perspective of Mood,Modality and Appraisal system basing on the interpersonal function theory. Through theanalysis of different sentence types, modal verbs, and evaluation of the word, this paperexplores the characteristics embodied in the interpersonal function and provides a newperspective for the study of children’s literature.The main findings of this study are as follows:Firstly, different choices of mood reflect the interaction, social status and the relationshipbetween the speakers.Secondly, the choices of modal verbs and modal additionals reflect the characteristics of thespeakers.Thirdly, the choices of different vocabulary reflect the speaker’s attitude and evaluation to theworld, thereby affecting the interpersonal relationship between the speakers.