A Comparative Study Of Interpersonal Functions Of English And Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions

Due to the diverse usage of adverbs,they have always been a hot and difficult point in linguistic research.The comparative study of English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions(“ACs” for short)started late.The existing comparative study of English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions mostly are carried out from the perspectives of syntactic features and semantic relations,while the comparative study of them from the perspective of interpersonal function is relatively rare.This thesis takes 5 novels of the famous British female novelist Jane Austen and their Chinese versions as the corpus sources.Based on Halliday’s functional linguistic theory and Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory,adopting the quantitative analysis method and qualitative analysis method,the thesis classifies the English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions in Jane Austen’s works and their Chinese versions,compares and analyzes the interpersonal function of different categories of Adverbial Conjunctions in the mood structure and modality system.All the analyses are supported by the real text corpus.Through the analysis,it is found that different categories of English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions have different interpersonal functions.The main findings of this thesis are as follows:1.As modal adjuncts:English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions with interpersonal function can be used to express different kinds of moods and modality in the interpersonal function system.2.In the mood structure:1)About 90%of English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions have the potential to express interpersonal function,and about 10%of Adverbial Conjunctions can hardly imply interpersonal function.2)Conditional ACs,Resultative ACs,Inferential ACs,Assertive ACs,Explanative ACs,Negative Adversative ACs,Supplementary Adversative ACs、Exceptive ACs、Reinforcing ACs showing special attention have typical interpersonal functions;English and Chinese Previous Temporal ACs,Equative ACs and Reinforcing ACs showing further enhancing are sometimes used to express interpersonal function,while Subsequent Temporal ACs,Contrastive Adversative ACs and Unexpected Adversative ACs normally do not imply interpersonal meanings.3.In the modality system:only some English and Chinese ACs in the Explanative,Negative Adversative,Supplementary Adversative,Approximate Inferential and Implicit Assertive types,such as surely,probably,dique(的确),keneng(可能),can play a part in expressing probability in Modalization,realizing objective implicit orientation and respectively having different values.This study aims to fill the gaps in the study of English and Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions from the perspective of interpersonal function,to help English and Chinese language learners understand adverbs more deeply and to provide literature enthusiasts with a new perspective to appreciate literature works.