Interpersoanl Meaning And Characterization

According to Halliday,the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics,the function of language can be divided into three meta-functions: ideational function,textual function,and interpersonal function.Interpersonal meaning focuses on the interpersonal,changeable and negotiable meaning in discourse.In recent years,interpersonal meaning has been widely applied to the analysis of different texts such as speech,advertisement,news,literature and so forth,and great research achievements have been obtained.In the analysis of literary discourse,the analysis of novels receives widespread attention while few researches are done in the field of the play,especially from the perspective of interpersonal function.Plays mainly consist of the dialogues,which function to construct the interpersonal relationship among the protagonists.Therefore,the interpersonal meaning of the dialogues in the play is worth further exploration.Based on the interpersonal function in Systemic Functional Linguistics,this research further explores the interpretation of the play and its literary significance from the perspective of the mood and modality system.This thesis chooses the four dialogues among the three main characters from An Ideal Husband as a corpus.With the qualitative and quantitative research methods,it analyzes the distributional features of interpersonal resources in the dialogues and deepens the exploration on how interpersonal resources help to construct the personalities,attitude and relations of the main characters.The results of the research are as follows:(1)In the chosen dialogues of the three main characters,there are some differences in the distribution of the mood and modality resources.According to the analysis of the mood system,Robert uses the interrogative mood frequently.In the beginning,Robert uses the interrogative mood to make requests to Mrs.Cheveley in a polite manner.In the later stage,most of the interrogative clauses used by Robert are rhetorical questions,which are employed to show his complaints to Lady Chiltern.Mrs.Cheveley utters a number of declaratives to show her purpose and control the dialogue.Interrogatives account for a high percentage in Lady Chiltern’s utterances,which are used to sound out the attitude of Robert.In terms of the modality,Robert uses few high-value modal operators to express his refusal to Mrs.Cheveley’s requirements at the beginning.In the second stage,Robert uses a lot of low and median value modal operators to show his submission.When communicating with Robert,Mrs.Cheveley uses many a high-value modal operator to demonstrate her threatening attitude.As for the dialogues between Robert and Lady Chiltern,in the former stage,when Lady Chiltern knows that her husband will support the Argentine scheme,she uses high-value modal operators to make commands and tries to sway him from his decision.However,in the latter stage,Robert has a fierce dispute with Lady Chiltern after his scandal is unveiled.It can be seen that Robert frequently uses high and median value modal operators to express his dissatisfaction with Lady Chiltern.The mood and modality analysis of the dialogues reveals the change of the relationship and attitude among the three main characters.(2)In virtue of the analysis of the changes in the choice of the mood and modal operators in the dialogues between Robert and Mrs.Cheveley and the dialogues between Robert and Lady Chiltern,the personalities of the protagonists can be unveiled clearly.Moreover,the theme of the play can be interpreted through linguistic analysis.Robert is the center of the play,the changes in the choice of his language reveal the contradiction in his personality.Under the threat of Mrs.Cheveley,Robert’s attitude towards Mrs.Cheveley changes from resistance to compromise.Confronted with Lady Chiltern’s inquiry,Robert feels guilty about concealing his scandal from his wife.And he is also dissatisfied with the moral restriction that Lady Chiltern imposes on him.The change of Robert’s attitudes towards Mrs.Cheveley and Lady Chiltern demonstrates his selfishness and hypocritical nature.Besides,Lady Chiltern and Mrs.Cheveley are opposite in personality.One is upright and noble and the other is evil and sophisticated.Therefore,the characterization of Robert Chiltern shows the dramatist’s irony to upper class’ value of hypocrisy,venality,and selfishness.This thesis,through applying the interpersonal meaning to the study of An Ideal Husband,helps to testify the feasibility of utilizing systemic functional linguistics to interpret literary works.