An Analysis Of Mental Maturity Of The Protagonist In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland From The Perspective Of Transitivity

Systemic-Functional Grammar holds language has three meta-functions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.The transitivity system is one of the means to perform ideational function.Many scholars have analyzed transitivity system in literary works.For example,Deirdre Burton(1982: 195-196)analyzes the transitivity system in The Bell Jar,revealing that transitivity system is an effective tool to explore the power relation in literary works.Shen Dan(2006: 4-5)explores the stylistic feature of Langston Hughes' On the Road by using the transitivity system,demonstrating that it helps reveal the complicated relationship between the real writer and the hidden writer.However,less attention has been paid to the research of transitivity system in the protagonist's mental maturity in children's literature.Hence,this thesis does a tentative analysis in this aspect,aiming to reveal the protagonist's mental changes in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the perspective of transitivity.Alice's adventures in Wonderland is regarded as a representative work written by Lewis Carroll,a famous English author,mathematician and logician.This story is about Alice,a little girl,who enters a Wonderland after falling into a rabbit hole,meets with many creature and experiences many fantastic adventures.In the Wonderland,she continuously knows herself and keeps growing.This thesis chooses clauses related to Alice following the development of this story.The chosen clauses are divided into three stages: the confused stage,the transforming stage and the mature stage.Then,the chosen clauses at each stage are analyzed in accordance with six types of transitivity processes with the aim to answer three questions:(1)What is difference in the distribution of each processes at every stage?(2)What changes in Alice's mentality are revealed by such differences?The research demonstrates the following findings:(1)There are differences in the distribution of each process at three different stages.Not much difference can be found in material,relational,behavioral and existential processes.The difference mainly lies in mental and verbal processes.The distribution of mental processes decreased in number from the confused stage to the mature stage,which reveals the confusion of Alice gradually diminishesbut the self-confidence increases.By contrast,the distribution of verbal processes increases in number,especially at the transforming stage,which shows the Alice is more and more confident and have the courage to express herself in exploring the Wonderland.(2)As for the psychological maturity,it mainly occurs in four aspects.Firstly,in terms of the self-identity,Alice changes from a confused and perplexed mental state to a clear and unambiguous one about her self-identity.Secondly,in thinking ability,Alice is transformed from blindly following orders of others to thinking independently,gradually gaining the courage to bravely fight against the unreasonable orders.Thirdly,in terms of the ability to deal with the emergency,Alice is changed from losing her head and keeping cry at the beginning to keeping calm and dealing with resourcefully.Lastly,in interpersonal skills,Alice gradually improves a lot.To sum up,through analyzing the transitivity system of the protagonist's psychological maturity in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,the research can broaden study on transitivity system and a new research angle can be provided for exploring the children's literature.