A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Everyday Use

Functional stylistics takes language as a system which has meaning potential,and its theoretical basis is Hallidy's systemic functional grammar.It is not confined to the internal language but analyzes the language on the level of social environment.Functional stylistics is an important branch of modern stylistics;it offers a new perspective for text analysis and plays an increasingly important role in modern stylistics.Alice Walker(1944-)is a contemporary Afro-American woman poet,novelist,activist and winner of the Pulitzer prize;she pays attention to black women's social status and freedom;her efforts for women faith,dignity and freedom description in the social environment where gender discrimination and racial discrimination were popular get a great social responses.In this thesis,the corpus comes from the novel Everyday Use,which is one of the excellent novels Alice Walker wrote in the novel collections Love and Trouble in 1973 and later won the Rosenthal prize of the National College of Literature and Art.The novel develops with Mrs John's narration,describing the relationship between the mother(Mrs John)and her two daughters;the mother(Mrs John)is a less educated but strong-minded rural labor women;there are big differences in two daughters'life experiences,personality traits and appearance;the novel's climax lies in the different choices when they face the quilt which is a symbol of Black heritage.At present,the researches about the novel mainly exist in feminist criticism,cultural identity,theme cultural metaphor and psychology of characters;the researches from the functional stylistics are relatively less.Under this background,the functional stylistic theory will be used to analyze the novel from the transitivity system of ideational function,mood and modality system of interpersonal function and thematic system of textual function to explore the language characteristics so that to provide a new angle to understand the novel for readers;besides,the author of the thesis also wants to find out the real writing purpose of Alice Walker from the language characteristics.This thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter introduces the research background,research purpose,research significance and data collection method.The second chapter is the literature review;the first part of this chapter is Alice Walker's literary achievements and previous researches about Alice Walker;then the previous studies on this novel are described;next is a brief introduction of the research of functional stylistics.The third chapter is the theoretical framework,introducing the style,stylistics and its research methods,mainly about the theoretical basis of functional stylistics,namely,the three metafunctions:ideational function,interpersonal function and the textual function on the aspects of transitivity,mood and modality,and thematic structure.In the last part of this chapter,the register theory will be introduced.The fourth chapter is the core part of the thesis,which analyzes the text from the perspective of transitivity in ideational function,modality and mood in interpersonal function and thematic structure in textual function.The fifth chapter is the analysis of register from perspectives field,tenor and mood.The sixth chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes the findings of the study,the limitations and the prospects for future researches.