A Study Of Attitudinal Resources Of Discourses In Sense And Sensibility

Jane Austen has been regarded as one of the most famous writers in England during the late 18th century and the early 19th century.Sense and Sensibility,Jane Austen's first work,telling Dashwood sisters' love stories,has been considered as one of the most classical love stories in British literary history.In this novel,Jane Austen depicts vivid character images by skillful artistic techniques.Since this novel was published,many scholars have studied discourses of characters from different perspectives such as stylistics and narration.This thesis attempts to analyze attitudinal resources of female discourses in the novel to explore personality and personality changes of heroines.The Appraisal Theory proposed firstly by Martin in the 1990s,which is the extension of international meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics.This theory contributes to exploring interpersonal meaning of novels.According to Martin,the Appraisal Theory includes three categories:attitude,engagement and graduation.As the core of the Appraisal Theory,attitude system includes further three subsystems:affect,judgement and appreciation.The Appraisal Theory is concerned with different kinds of attitudes that are negotiated in a text,the force of the feelings involved and the ways in which values are embodied and readers are aligned.So far,the Appraisal Theory has been applied widely into the analysis of attitudinal resources in the news and speeches.Recently,there are more and more researches focusing on the analysis of attitudinal resources in the novels.In Sense and Sensibility,there are lots of attitudinal resources in female discourses,which provides rich corpus for this thesis.Based on attitude system,the subsystem of the Appraisal Theory,this thesis attempts to take female discourses as research corpus and analyze mainly evaluative discourses of heroines towards three heroes and then discuss distribution of attitudinal resources of heroines'discourses.Through the analysis of distribution of attitudinal resources,this thesis aims to explore attitudes and personality of characters.Through the analysis of changes of distribution of attitudinal resources,this thesis aims to reflect attitudinal changes and personality changes of characters.Through the deep analysis of different choice of attitudinal resources,this thesis aims to reveal how females change their female consciousness to live in the patriarchal society in England in the early 19th century.The major findings are as follows:Firstly,attitudinal resources can be realized by affect system,judgement system and appreciation system.Attitudinal resources that express people's inner feelings are likely to be realized by affect system.Attitudinal resources that express people's personality and behavior and evaluation on things are realized by judgement system and appreciation system.Secondly,the usage of attitudinal resources can reflect character's personality indirectly.Compared with judgement resources and appreciation resources,affect resources tend to be employed by emotional people to express inner feelings.However,rational people don't express their feelings directly,instead,they employ judgement resources and appreciation resources to express their attitude towards the outside world.What's more,the different choice of attitudinal resources can reveal female consciousness in the patriarchal society.Most females in the patriarchal society are likely to employ attitudinal resources to evaluate people's appearance;a few independent females tend to focus on people's quality and behavior.Finally,changes of distribution of attitudinal resources can reflect attitudinal changes of heroines and reveal personality changes of characters.The changes of amount of affect resources,judgement resources and appreciation resources indicate people's personality dynamic changes from sensibility to sense.Therefore,this thesis studies attitudinal resources in the novel based on the Appraisal Theory,which proves the feasibility of the Appraisal Theory in the appreciation of literary works,broadens the extension of the study of interpersonal meaning and promotes the understanding for the Appraisal Theory.What's more,this research analyzes characters'personality changes and female consciousness changes based on attitude system,which provides a new linguistic perspective for the appreciation of literary works,helps readers to understand plots,characters and the background of the era better.