An Analysis Of Heathcliff And Catherine Earnshaw In Wuthering Heights From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistics

Wuthering Heights is the only published novel written by the famous female English writer Emily Bronte. It has been appreciated and studied from different perspectives by a great number of scholars both at home and abroad since its publication. However, there are little thorough and complete analyses of personalities of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw from Functional Stylistics. In fact, this thesis is about to analyze the personalities of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in the novel from the perspective of Functional Stylistics.Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) is put forward by M. A. K. Halliday, it has been widely applied to analyzing different types of discourse. Meanwhile, its combination with stylistics, naming Functional Stylistics, has attracted a lot of attention from scholars both at home and abroad, which is playing a more and more important role in modern stylistic analysis. The language analysis of Functional Stylistics is from the perspective of the three metafunctions in Functional Grammar raised by Halliday, and they are ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. Researches either focus on one of the three metafunctions or pay attention to all of the three metafunctions.The present study begins with a general introduction to the basic theories of stylistics and Functional Stylistics. Then, this thesis applies two of the three metafunctions of Functional Stylistics, which are ideational metafunction and interpersonal metafunction, and analyzes the personalities of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. The study is conducted from the perspective of transitivity system in ideational metafunction, mood system and modality system in interpersonal metafunction, to analyzing personalities of Heathcliff and Catherine. Through the transitivity analyses, mood and modality analyses, it can be seen that Heathcliff is characterized by his aloofness, persistence and vindictiveness, while Catherine Earnshaw is characterized by her willfulness, liveliness and grumpiness.To sum up, there are three research results of this thesis. Firstly, it provides a new angle to better understanding and appreciating Wuthering Heights by using Functional Stylistics to analyze the personalities of characters in this great work. Secondly, the present study testifies the interpretation function of the Functional Stylistics through the examples by applying Functional Stylistics to the analysis of literary language of the novel. Thirdly, it analyzes the personalities of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.