Stylistic Analysis Of Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon

After Obama was selected as America’s first black president, the language and culture of the blacks become the focus of people’s concern again. Black writers, their literary works depicting life of the blacks and disseminating black culture as well as the linguistic performance of these literary works also attract close attention in the literary circle. The author will choose Song of Solomon, a notable work of the famous black female writer Toni Morrison, as research object and carry out a relatively comprehensive and objective analysis to the language of this novel by the stylistics approach, starting with Black Vernacular English. The author will carry out the stylistic analysis of this novel from three aspects, phonology, lexicon and syntax, with the aim of exploring and explaining how the writer conveys thematic meanings and aesthetic effects through careful language choice and style design. In this thesis, the following three questions will be discussed. The first question is what the most prominent stylistic features of this novel on the phonological, lexical and syntactical levels are. The second one is if these language features comply with Black Vernacular English. The third one is why the writer chooses such language for her novel.Through systematic analysis, the thesis draws the following conclusions. In this novel, while the narrative parts conform to American Standard English, dialogues between characters demonstrate the particular linguistic features of Black Vernacular English in the aspects of phonology, lexicon and syntax to varying degrees. Phonologically, language of this novel has the following characteristics:if the first syllable of a word is unstressed, it will be left out; phonological variation from [in] to [in] could be seen, which is incarnated in word spelling variation from "-ing" to "-in". Lexically, a series of unique clipped forms which end with "-a" are used; Syntactically, language of this novel has the following characteristics:unique negative word "ain’t" is widely used; multi-negation is used to express the meaning of general negation; omission of "be" occurs in SLP structure (subject, link word and predicative) and sentences of continuous tense; "constant be" is used to emphasize the high frequency of an action, accident or condition; inflexion indicating third person singular predicate is left out; pronouns are not constrained by cases; word order of declarative sentence remains unchanged in questions.Based on the above findings, the author makes further discussion on how the writer realized thematic meanings and aesthetic effects through ingenious use of Black Vernacular English and gets the following conclusions. First, language and culture have an inseparable relation. Therefore, the novel’s motif of black culture inheritance determines the employing of Black Vernacular English and the employing of Black Vernacular English embodies its motif more clearly. Second, the employing of Black Vernacular English in dialogues between characters makes the characters in the novel more vivid and their features more outstanding. Third, the sharp contrast and conflict between Black Vernacular English and American Standard English incarnate the bitter cultural conflict between black culture and American mainstream culture.The stylistic analysis to this novel from the perspective of Black Vernacular English can help readers get a better understanding of the novel’s motif of black culture inheritance, get to know the living conditions of the blacks under the oppression of the mainstream white culture, and then better comprehend the black history and black culture.