A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Pride And Prejudice

Jane Austen (1775-1817), a well-known English female novelist, was born in a family of village priest. During her lifetime, she has written six novels, leaving much precious fortune in the literature field. Influenced by her living surroundings, her novels almost concern the trifling matters of that time, but her novels are full of enduring appeal. As one of Jane Austen’s masterpieces, Pride and Prejudice is popular all over the world. With her marvelous writing skills, the novel’s characters are well drawn. Its plots and scenes are full of twists. The conversations sparkle with wit and humor. The sharp social commentary and clever dialogues have an excellent show in Pride and Prejudice. In the previous study of the novel, many scholars focus on the analysis of marriage theme, female consciousness and narrative patterns. In the limited stylistic studies, they carry out the research from lexical and grammatical aspects. Therefore, it is necessary to make a functional stylistic analysis of Pride and Prejudice.Stylistics, as an interdisciplinary research field, studies the stylistic features of literary works based on linguistic theories. Since the 1970s, functional stylistics has a great boom and becomes an important branch of the modern stylistics. Functional stylistics is based on M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, which treats language as a meaning potential. It consists of three meta-functions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Guided by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, the thesis aims to carry out a functional stylistic analysis of Pride and Prejudice and find the stylistic features involved in syntactic stratum, semantic stratum and discourse stratum. On the one hand, it is conducted to stress the theories of functional stylistics, which serves as a powerful tool to analyze the literary works. On the other hand, it aims to call more researchers to analyze literary works from the angle of functional stylistics.The thesis is made up of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice, the significance and purpose of the study and the thesis’s organization. The second chapter is the literature review, concerning the current researches on Pride and Prejudice at home and abroad. The third chapter is the theoretical framework. It displays Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and its three meta-functions. The fourth chapter is the main part of the thesis, which analyzes the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function in Pride and Prejudice. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of the thesis, which lists the research’s findings, limitations and some suggestions for the future study.