A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Black Woman Identity And Power Relations In Their Eyes Were Watching God

Critical discourse analysis treats language as a kind of social practice.It aims to reveal power relations,hierarchies and gender inequality by analyzing written texts and spoken words.For those who choose to study on Their Eyes Were Watching God,they are always attracted by the initiation theme,black folklore,language style,narrative strategy;few of them care about the complicated identity changes and power relations hidden in the language.Therefore,this thesis studies and explores the fictional dialogues in this novel.Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze the seventy one examples collected from Their Eyes Were Watching God.And then,according to the transitivity system,mood and modality system of systemic functional linguistics,the seventy one examples are divided into different groups.And then,the proportion of six material processes,the distribution of mood and modality explored by Janie are interpreted.Through studying those dialogues between the heroine Janie and her three husbands,it is found that Janie tends to employ mental processes and verbal processes to transmit information and show her feelings in the beginning to later frequently using relational processes and material processes to show her awareness of things and the effects she exerts on things around her.In case of modality system,heroine tends to use low modal operations from beginning to express her uncertainty to later using median and high modal operators to express her own suggestions and certainty.Finally,in the aspects of mood system,Janie often employs interrogatives to ask for information at the beginning to later employing imperatives and declaratives to show her judgments about things.To crown it all,this thesis explores identity changes and power relations in Their Eyes Were Watching God with Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical tool from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.The research results to some extent can help readers cultivate critical thinking and critical discourse consciousness,thus they can better understand implied information of the novel.Furthermore,the analysis enriches the relevant studies of this novel and widens the applications of linguistics in the literature field.