A Study On Interpersonal Meaning Of Female Discourse In Desperate Housewives

According to the systemic functional grammar provided by IHaliday,language hathree meta-functions:ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Interpesonal means that language has the function to express his personal experience and the mental process,which reflects the relationship and the degree of intimacy between the listener and speaker.What's more,language is used to express the social position,identity,attitude and intention of the speaker as well as the inference,appraisal and judgment to the other things.The interpersonal function is the main way to establish and maintain the social relationship that is used to study how to establish and maintain the interpersonal relationship of the communicative participants.Therefore,the systemic functional grammar has attracted common attention from plenty of linguists and litterateurs.Many studies make an analysis of the interpersonal meaning of literary works from the perspective of interpersonal function while few studies pay attention to interpersonal meaning of the dialogues among characters in series.Based on theoretical basis of the systemic functional grammar,the thesis takes the dialogues in Desperate Housewives as the corpus,which aims to make an analysis of the interpersonal meaning of female discourse in Desperate Housewives from the perspective of mood system and modality system.Through analyzing the interpersonal meaning of female discourse and revealing the personality of character,this thesis provides an interpretation of personality from the perspective of linguistics.This thesis makes a deeper analysis of the interpersonal meaning realized through the female discourse,which aims to reveal the dilemmas of modern American middle-class women and how the women fight against the patriarchal society.Here are the findings:this American series Desperate Housewives under a banner of feminism shapes three modern housewives images.The three modern housewives are the epitome of the whole American society,who stand for different sorts of American middle-class women.The three characters choose different kinds of realization through mood system and modality system when they talk with their husbands,children and friends,which reveal the different kinds of personalities and realize the interpersonal meaning.The different choice of mood types in mood system and modal operators in modality system reflects the modern American middle-class women's special ways to deal with the interpersonal relationship,including conjugal relationship,parent-child relations and neighborhood relationship.They are not following advice and rules of their husband any more while they become more and more independently minded,brave and independent.This thesis analyzes the interpersonal meaning of the female discourse in Desperate Housewives realized by mood metaphor and modality metaphor respectively from mood system and modality system.The different choice of mood metaphor discourse and modality metaphor discourse reflects that the modern American middle-class women still can't change the relationship established in patriarchal society.Their lives still centered on their family,marriage and love and they have to face the dilemma from the imbalance between marriage and love,career and family.They still maintain the status relationship and value standards.Moreover,this thesis further reveals the dilemmas faced by modern American middle-class women.The research further proves the feasibility of applying the systemic functional grammar into the analysis of interpersonal meaning in TV Series,broadens the scope of the study of interpersonal meaning,and provides the basis for interpersonal meaning analysis on the other TV Series.Next,this thesis make an analysis of the personality of characters from the interpersonal meaning angle,which provides a new scope of studying the TV Series from the perspectives of linguistics and helps the audience roundly and from all sides understand the writing connotation and the era meaning of TV Series.What's more,this thesis renders a linguistic perspective for appreciating literary works and facilitates literature.