Transitivity Analysis Of Characterization In Stream-of-consciousness Novel The Sound And The Fury

Systemic Functional Linguistics regards language system as a semantic potential,which can be subdivided into ideational semantic potential,interpersonal semantic potential and textual semantic potential.When people organize a discourse,they will make choices in the system network of semantic according to concrete context.The ideational one is mainly realized by transitivity system.Being a semantic system,transitivity describes what people have seen,heard and what they have done in the real world(including inner world)in terms of several processes combined with related participants and environmental elements to realize humans' experience expression in clauses.From the perspective of transitivity,we are given an insight into the experiential meaning implied in lexical and grammatical level.As for the transitivity analysis of stream-of-consciousness novels,previous studies mainly focus on mental process clauses.But in most cases,mental processes like “he thinks” are omitted,and characters' complex inner world involving various transitivity processes are shown directly and originally,which is an important way for characterization.In this respect,it is valuable to analyze how transitivity choice in stream-of-consciousness description contributes to characters' personalities.This thesis aims to analyze the content of three main characters' stream-of-consciousness in American novelist William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury from the perspective of transitivity.By means of corpus,annotate related clauses and retrieve according to transitivity system.The thesis makes quantitative and qualitative analysis on the retrieved results to reveal the relationship between transitivity choice and characters' personalities in stream-of-consciousness description.The results show that material processes mainly reflect character's ability ofobservation and understanding of other people's action.On the other hand,they reflect the power relationship between people.As for relational processes,they reflect characters' judgment and understanding of things' attribute.They also indicate attitude and affection that characters take to other people or things.Mental processes mainly involve perceptive processes and cognitive processes.The former are at the lower level of mental processes,reflecting people's intuitive perception,while the latter are the higher level,reflecting peoples' cognitive ability in deeper mind.Character's personalities are mainly presented by verbiages in verbal processes,and the representation of verbal processes reflects the flowing feature of consciousness,indicating characters' emotion and mental state.Existential processes present characters philosophical thinking of existence and behavioral processes combined with circumstances present characters' attitude and affection towards behavers.This research provides transitivity interpretation for characters' personalities in The Sound and the Fury,which can help readers deepen understanding of characters' personalities as well as change and development of consciousness.It has expanded the research direction of transitivity and provides a new perspective for the study of stream-of-consciousness novels.