A Study Of Dialogues In Sister Carrie From The Perspective Of Context Of Situation

Context refers to the environment in which language happens. As an important influencing factor in the communication, context has attracted scholars’ attention at home and abroad. As to context, scholars in different times hold their own opinions. Based on the study of Malinowski and Firth, the founder of systemic functional linguistics—Halliday thinks that language has a close relation to the certain situations. He studies context from three aspects: context of culture, context of situation and context of co-text. Among the three aspects, context of situation is regarded as the core concept. According to the view of systemic functional linguistics, the theory of context, especially the context of situation,can be applied to the analysis of discourse. This provides the important theoretical basis for the study of discourse.Sister Carrie is the masterpiece of Theodore Dreiser, a famous naturalist in America.The comments and studies on this work are mainly from the perspective of literature while studies from linguistic view is relatively few. Based on the view of systemic functional linguistics, the theory of context of situation can be used to probe into literature discourse,so it is valuable to study Sister Carrie from the point of linguistics.Context of situation includes three variables: field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. This thesis mainly uses the three variables to analyze the dialogues in Sister Carrie. Field of discourse refers to what is actually taking place. In Sister Carrie, the analysis is related to two aspects: various settings and subject matters. Through the analysis, the purpose of speakers in different contexts can be revealed. Tenor of discourse refers to the relationship of participants. In the dialogues of Sister Carrie, the analysis reflects in mood, modality and address. With the analysis of these factors, the relationship of different people can be shown clearly. Mode of discourse refers to the way of verbal communication. Mode analysis of dialogues is realized in the theme-rheme and rhetorical devices. The analysis will show the function of language and the intention of speakers in the specific situation. The analysis of Sister Carrie from the perspective of context of situation can show how the context of situation constrains the choice of language in dialogues.In this thesis, the author tries to probe into the dialogues in Sister Carrie on the ground of the context of situation. Through the analysis, the hidden feeling and implicature behind the dialogues can be demonstrated from the view of linguistics. This will show the feasibility of the application of context of situation in literary works.