An SFL Perspective To The Analysis Of Movie Lines

Film is one of the most important media forms in our daily life and it is also a medium to broadcast a message of arts and culture of certain regions.The success of a film is also very closely related to its application of language.This thesis is going to apply the theory of systemic functional grammar of linguistics to analyze the language features in the dialogue of the film A Beautiful Mind which won the 74^th Oscar the best film award directed by Ron Howard.The theoretical cornerstone of this thesis is the three metafunctions of Halliday’s theory.It aims to reveal the language features of oral discourse through applying Transitivity System,Logical Functions,Mood,Modality,Adjunct,Thematic Structure,Information Structure and Cohesion to the lines in the movie.The major findings of this thesis,in terms of transitivity system,the majority goes to material process in the verbal lines of the film,similar as the written language.It involves people’s activities.Thus the addresser needs to explain clearly the participants and the environment in order to develop a conversation and mental process widely applied in this film as well in order to fulfill the story of a schizophrenia inpatient’s plenty of inner activities.The subjective modal verb shows more frequently in verbal context than written one and there are often intense mood adjuncts which we can distinguish the characters from each other.The majority of thematic progression pattern is Liner thematic progression and Continuous thematic pattern,and different types of context are realized in various structures of the sentences.The application of systemic functional grammar in current research setting is widespread in the analysis of written discourse,but seldom in oral discourse.Therefore,the author of this thesis attempts to summarize the language features of the oral discourse through the dialogue of the film A Beautiful Mind to blaze a way in the study of comparison between language features of written discourse and oral discourse and thus to demonstrate that the three metafunctions of systemic functional grammar are not only feasible in analysing oral discourse but the function of it is not negligible.The verbal lines are chosen from the conversations between different characters in the movie.With Halliday’s theoretic framework and combination of the theory of systemic functional grammar and its practical usage,the author shows how the film is developed step by step,explores the differences of the characters through analysing their features of language and finds out how the film is successful with its delicate use of language.