| Systemic Functional Linguistics emphasizes on functionality of the practical applications of language and systematicness of the language using choice. Based on the theory of Register and three Metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the thesis analyzes the Verbless Clause's empirical classification in the practical discourse, and discusses the structural features, three metafunctions and stylistic effect of Verbless Clause.Halliday clearly states:clause is the basic unit of English discourse (Halliday,1985). Lv Shuxiang analyzes the Chinese clause, that the dynamic unit of language is clause and sentence (which contains one or more clauses). Clause is the basic unit (Lv Shuxiang,1979:28-29). With the development of discourse analysis deeper and deeper, the concept of "clause" has been completely introduced into the discourse Study. According to the structure of the form, Quirk, in his book:A Grammar of Contemporary English divides clause into three kinds:finite clause, non-finite clause and verbless clause.Verbless clause, which is concise, precise, and comprehensive and key point extruded, often appears in the oral communication. The popular U.S. TV series, CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) adopts many verbless clauses. This verbless clause corpus of the thesis which are all chosen from 16 episodes of Las Vegas Season 8, are empirically analyzed in the thesis.According to Halliday's Register Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics' three metafunctions, the thesis analyzes verbless clause on the following aspects:Communication of human is definitely based on the certain occasion, a certain topic, for certain purposes, to a certain listener. The circumstances for human social life and activities are diverse. The relationship between people is changing all the time. Therefore the practical application of languages produces many variables. These variables are composed of Register. It reveals the general principles of language under different situational contexts. Register theory combines experiential meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning organically to explain the usage and the essence of language. And three variables of the register, field, tenor and mode help us to understand how the mode of verbless clause realizes the tenor under the field.The experiential function of Systemic Functional Linguistics can help humans understand how the language is used to communicate the facts, thing in objective word and the thought, mind and emotion in the subjective world. That is to say, experiential function helps humans indicate the entity and the relation between the entities. The thesis discusses how verbless clause, lack of experiential element, realizes the objective and subjective world.As human's communication tools, the most essential function of language is its social interpersonal function. When expressing the interpersonal functions such as, order, confirmation or refuse (Liao Chuanfeng,2007), what elements helps the verbless clause to realize the interpersonal function, to build up the interrelationship, to influence others behave and express own attitude towards the world.Language always begins with a starting point. People, in the communication, have to organize their language logically to transfer the information to the listener. That is the textual functions in the three metafunctions. The study of verbless clause under the theme structure and information structure reveals us to the organization and transformations of the language.Such discourse analysis of one language phenomenon can help language learners a lot improve the communication skills. Again, the facts proves "functional linguistics grammar is a theory more suitable than other theories in discourse analysis. We can only use this only one theory to analyze the discourse." (Huang Guowen,2001). |
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