A Study On Attitudinal Meanings Of Different Narrative Roles In Emma

Jane Austen(1775-1817)has always been considered as the greatest English author during the late 18 th century and the early 19 th century.Her novel Emma,given a high evaluation by critics,is well-known in the world by its special artistic technique and intriguing plot.Although presently in the world there are many researches of the novel from different perspectives such as the theme of the work,character depiction,psychological analysis,cultural criticism and so on,few researches have been done on the inscribed and invoked attitudinal meanings based on the Appraisal System,thereby analyzing the novel's character depiction,plot development and theme presentation.The Appraisal System,proposed by J.R.Martin and other scholars,aims to expand the study of the interpersonal meaning within Systemic Functional Linguistics.The system consists of three sub-systems,namely Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.As the core of the whole system,the attitude system falls into three categories,namely Affect,Judgement and Appreciation.By deploying the attitudinal subcategories,the Appraisal System puts emphasis on the interpretation of evaluative meaning and intersubjectivity in language communication.What's more,narratologists focus their studies on narrative exchange mode of a novel,in which different narrative roles are introduced through an analysis of different narrative points of view.The appraisal resources are plentiful in novels and different narrative roles serve as different appraisers.Thus,the expressions of attitudinal meanings by narrative roles are employed in different ways.By adopting the Attitude System within the Appraisal System and the concepts of narrative roles and narrative points of view within narratology as the theoretical framework,the present study aims to analyze the distribution of inscribed and invoked attitudinal meanings,find out the similarities and differences of attitudinal meanings expressed by different narrative roles from different points of view and discuss how inscribed and invoked attitudinal meanings contribute to the analysis of the character depiction,plot development,theme presentation and the expression of irony in Emma.The major findings are as follows.Firstly,the expressions of inscribed and invoked attitudinal meanings are related to narrative roles.The narrator and character's attitudes are usually expressed in the inscribed way and those of the implied author are mostly invoked.Secondly,different allocation modes are used in the same novel.They are used in a prosodic way to realize the extension of the evaluations in order to transfer values and purposes of the author.Thirdly,there exists difference in the manifestation of the attitudinal meanings expressed by different appraisers.When holding the opposite opinion with the narrator or the character,the implied author intends to express his ironic tone by invoked attitude.Fourthly,the appraisal meanings are subjective ones but the analysis of narrative point of view provides an objective basis for the identification of different appraisers,thereby helping to figure out the configuration of allocations of attitudinal meanings by different appraisers.Therefore,the present study has its power in interpreting the studies of literary works framed by the combination of the Appraisal System and the narrative concept,thus providing a reasonable framework for the analysis of literary works.Besides,the study verifies part of the network with different allocation modes of appraisal meanings proposed by professor Peng(2015),which contributes to the improvement and development of the Appraisal System.Furthermore,the thesis provides a new linguistic perspective for the appreciation of novels by showing an objective evidence for the analysis of character depiction and theme presentation on the lexicogrammatical level.