The Linguistic Features Of Mark Twain’s Fiction From The Perspective Of Halliday’s Ideational Metafunction

Mark Twain is an important figure in American literature. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as one of his masterpieces, has enjoyed great popularity since its publication. The present thesis will expound on the linguistic features as well as the theme of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer based on the theoretical framework of Halliday’s ideational metafunction. As the novel is a representative work completed during the latter half of Twain’s lifetime which can be deemed as a mature period in his literary creation, the linguistic features shown in this novel can be generalized as the features of his novels.So far, the study on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been focused on literary criticism in terms of its artistic device, subject matter, linguistic characteristics and historical significance, with little space devoted to discussing it with Halliday’s ideational metafunction. Based on this, the current thesis will try to study on the linguistic features as well as the theme of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer based on Halliday’s ideational metafunction through a quantitative, qualitative and empirical approach. The first four chapters of this novel will be used as data. In so doing, the linguistic features highlighted by the foregrounding of numbers and distributions of transitivity processes can be summarized and theme of the novel can be dug out.After a deep and thorough analysis of the first four chapters, the author has found out that the numbers and distributions of different transitivity processes have a close relationship with the linguistic features and theme of the novel. The most prominent transitivity process is material process. Together with the behavioral processes, they present the readers lots of actions and events. The frequent occurrence of verbal processes symbolizes colloquialism known as a striking feature of Twain’s novel. The dialogues are short and simple with irregular and even vernacular English. Mental processes weigh a lot among all the transitivity processes. It reveals the inner world of characters through which a lifelike and fleshy character is molded. This process also plays an important role in the revelation of a “grow-up” theme. Mental processes are in strong contrast with the description of material processes, showing a bit of ironical humor. Lots of metaphors and wits are shown in mental process, making Twain’s language visualized and vivid. Relational process and existential process introduce the time, place and environment of the story as well as relations among characters, which promotes the development of plots and strengthens the coherence. Therefore, a complete narrative is distinctly manifested through an analysis of transitivity processes. To sum up, we can safely render answers to the two research questions through such analysis. Mark Twain’s works, profuse in peculiar personal wit and oratory as well as sharp social insight and analysis, integrate humor with irony. The antagonist’s process of maturity is clearly presented as well.The present study is significant. On the one hand it has enriched the application for analysis of literary works in terms of functional stylistics. On the other hand, the present thesis is innovative. It studies the striking linguistic features in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, providing a fresh insight into the realization of linguistic features of Mark Twain’s fiction. However, only the first four chapters of the novel will be analyzed due to the limitation of workload.