An Analysis Of Three Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway-a Functional Stylistic Perspective

Ernest Miller Hemingway, one of the greatest American writers in the20thcentury,has a far-reaching effect on20th-century fiction and the later generations with his particularwriting style and language. According to the investigation, the preceding researches on theshort stories by Hemingway are limited to the lexico-grammatical layer, such as transitivitysystem or mood system. And there is no systematic analysis of the short stories byHemingway from multi-perspectives on the basis of functional stylistics which provides anew interdisciplinary perspective to make a research on literature works that is actually aproduct woven in linguistic and ideational integral system. Thus, this thesis takes thistheoretical framework to make analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s three short stories, i.e. ADay’s Wait，A Clean Well-Lighted Place and Old Man at the Bridge.The theoretical basis of functional stylistics is based on systemic functional grammarproposed by Halliday. Functional stylistics analyzes language from three metafunctions,namely, ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The thesis mainlyadopts the methodology, advocated by Chinese functionalist Zhang Delu, as the basicapproach to systemic functional stylistic research which is driven by Linguistic descriptionand data collected from the local discourse. The present research firstly focuses on makinga detailed analysis of the three short stories by Hemingway through three matafunctionsand find out what are their general stylistic features in terms of transitivity system, moodand modality system, thematic and cohesion system. And then, the analysis takes thedescriptive approach to make a deeper exploration of the three short stories to fulfill theresearch and to reveal how the stylistic features in Hemingway’s works serve asforegrounding of the themes and profound meanings that are construed by threemetafunctions through the lexcogrammar.The research findings have verified that there are a large number of dialogues in theshort stories by Hemingway and language is specific and vivid. The use of a great majorityof dialogues indicates that there is the least amount of authorial intrusion in the story and itputs the readers inside the story. Secondly, the three short stories take the objectivenarration as its main writing style and the modal operator “would” and “will” with median value is the most used ones in the three short stories. The use of those modal operatorsexpresses the uncertain minds of characters and uncertain attitude of Hemingway which isalso the core idea of “Lost Generation”. Lastly, repetition in cohesion system contributes tothe establishment of the theme of the three short stories.Through analysis, functional stylistic is not only an effective way to analyze theliterary works, but also display the stylistic features of short stories by Hemingway andhelp reveal the theme of the three short stories.