Discourse Analysis On The Conversations Between People In The Jung Mansion And Granny Liu In Hong Lou Meng (a Dream Of Red Mansions) From The Appraisal Perspective

This thesis is based on the framework of Martin’s APPRAISAL theory, which contains three aspects:attitude, engagement and graduation. It conducts the discourse analysis of the conversations in Hong Lou Meng and its English version A Dream of Red Mansions in order to explore the interpersonal meaning in it.The construction of interpersonal meaning has to be finished under the guidance of linguistic theories. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was officially founded in1968by Halliday and it uses sociology to study the language functions from three aspects:the ideational metafunction, textual metafunction and interpersonal metafunction. However, classic systemic functional grammar has not had a complete system that can express the resources of the attitudes, positions and emotions of speakers. Therefore, in the1990s, Martin put forward the APPRAISAL theory on the basis of SFL, just to fill in the blank.As one of China’s four great classics, although A Dream of Red Mansions has been born for more than two hundred years and the characters have been known by the public, most people put textual research emphasis on the masters of the Jung Mansion, few people have studied the poor relative of the Jung Mansion-Granny Liu.Thus this paper attempts to analyze the conversations between people in the Jung Mansion and Granny Liu under the guidance of APPRAISAL theory. It seeks to interpret A Dream of Red Mansions from a new perspective in order to provide a tentative method for textual research and enrich the study of classics.