A Functional Stylistic Analysis Of Medical English

Functional stylistics, based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, describes and analyzes the structure and phenomenon of language, and explains and evaluates the stylistic effects of language. Halliday argues that language has three meta-functions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. Although functional stylistics is originally used for the analysis of literary works, in recent decades it is also applied to the analysis of non-literary works, especially scientific and technical works. This thesis attempts to elaborate a comparatively comprehensive and systematic analysis of medical English from the perspective of functional stylistics. It is composed of five chapters except for the introduction and conclusion.The thesis begins with a brief introduction of the theoretical background of the present research, the aim and significance of the thesis, the methodology and data resources of the study, and then shows the outline of the whole paper.Chapter One dwells on literary review of this study. It first presents an overview of style and stylistics, diverse orientations of stylistics, and then offers the theory of register and that of functional stylistics, and finally gives a short introduction of medical English.Chapter Two is register analysis of medical English. The three variables of situational context-field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse-form what called register. Medical English is analyzed in terms of these three variables. Field analysis of medical English includes research on lexical and grammatical level, and that of parenthesis. Tenor analysis of medical English consists of medical English used among professionals and that used between medical personnel and patients. And mode analysis of medical English is the study of written and spoken form in medical language.The following three chapters are the main body of this paper.Chapter Three studies the ideational function of medical English, which can be categorized into vocabulary and processes in transitivity system; the former mainly includes technical words, semi-technical words and synonyms; the latter consists of material process, relational process and mental process.Chapter Four discusses the interpersonal function of medical English, which is demonstrated respectively by vocabulary including neologisms and loan words, by mood system including declarative, interrogative, and imperative, and by modality system including modal auxiliary verbs, epistemic verbs, epistemic nouns, epistemic adjectives and adverbs.Chapter Five analyzes the textual function of medical English, which is divided into two parts, information structure consisting of nominalization, abbreviation, passive voice, long and complex sentences, and cohesion theory including ellipsis, substitution, reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.The last part is the conclusion of the whole paper. From the previous chapters the author draws a conclusion about the research of medical English from the perspective of functional stylistics and summarizes what have been done in this thesis.