A Study On Foregrounding In Alice's Adventure In Wonderland From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistics

Alice's Adventure in Wonderland is one of the classic and famous children's literary works.It tells about Alice's wonderful journey after falling into the rabbit hole,presenting the readers with a magic world.This work is favored by many readers: the marvelous plots,the skillful expressions and the elaborate pictures in the book make the story attractive.The distinctive features in this work are concerned by many scholars.As for the researches about this work,most researches are the studies of linguistic phenomenon from the perspective of linguistics,the exploration of themes from the perspective of literature,or the discussion of techniques of translating this work.However,few scholars have taken researches into the foregrounding features of this work.Foregrounding can help to reveal the style of the text and promote the understanding of the thematic meaning,so foregrounding analysis is necessary.The thesis will apply the analytic framework of foregrounding from Functional Stylistics and make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the foregrounding features at phonological level,graphological level,lexico-grammatical level and semantic level in Alice's Adventure in Wonderland.Foregrounding in Functional Stylistics includes deflection and incongruity: deflection refers to the overuse of a linguistic component,and incongruity refers to violation of normal usage of language.Both deflection and incongruity are prominences,but only when the prominences are motivated can they be regarded as foregrounding.The researcher not only analyzes the linguistic features of deflection and incongruity at these linguistic levels but also innovatively probes into the studies of pictures at graphological level and finds that if the prominent features in the pictures are related to the situation,they can be seen as a means of foregrounding.Such a new analysis mode will make up for the lack of only analyzing the pure text and expand the research scope of the work which can make the research more complete.After the research,the researcher finds that:(1)The foregrounding features at phonologic level are reflected on the uses of alliterations,end rhymes,elisions and approximants;(2)the foregrounding features at the graphological level are reflected on the use of capitalization,the deflectional use of punctuation,such as exclamatory marks and some deviated designs in pictures;(3)the foregrounding features at the lexicogrammatical level are reflected on the widely used material process and verbal process,the prominent use of high value,median value,low value modality of different characters,and the extensive use of marked themes and so on;(4)the foregrounding features at the semantic level are the deflections of the cohesive devices,such as repetition and so on.(5)These foregrounded ways can better show the “ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function” in the text,and can also highlight to describe a vivid and interesting journey to the readers.After the analysis of the foregrounding at different linguistic levels as well as the stylistic effects,the readers can have a better understanding of the artistic use of the language and that will be beneficial to enhance their comprehension of the theme and improve their appreciation of this work.