A Functional Study Of Projection In Narratives Of Marine Incident And Accident Reports

Projection is a complex language phenomenon which refers to that the language doesn't function as a representation of experience but as a representation of linguistic representation. This thesis is an attempt to study the distributions and characteristics of projection and how the projection realizes the three metafunctions of language in narrative part of Marine Incident and Accident Reports.By observation, it is found that the narrative part of a Marine Incident and Accident Report (Hereinafter shortened for MIAR) the description of the whole progress of marine incidents and accidents, and language phenomenon of projection is more obviously used in this part than in other parts of MIAR. Thus, all the narrative parts in the MIARs are extracted to build the corpus for this paper. Since the reports are formal texts and long sentences are used, so projection is to be studied in the rank of clauses complexes. Based on Halliday's interpretation of projection, with the supplementary explanation of projection types from Ding Jianxin, the writer divides projection into three types, namely paratactic projection, hypotactic projection and embedded projection. In view of Zeng Lei's multi-functional approaches toward projection, projection clause complexes are discussed from ideational perspective, interpersonal perspective and textual perspective in order to obtain an all-round and comprehensive understanding of projection.The previous studies of projection are mainly focused on the texts of news reports, fiction, and academic articles. Whereas, MIARs are a kind of text different from other texts, thus there must be something different and unique in projection using in this kind of texts, which can be reflected in the distributions and characteristics of projection. By discussing and analyzing the projection using in marine accidents, this thesis is hoped to be a complement to the study of projection and MIARs. Besides, the thesis is hoped to make contributions for readers to understanding the MIARs as well as the language phenomenon of projection better.