Identity Construction Of Novel Characters Through Attitude Markers

Metadiscourse refers to aspects of a text which explicitly organize the discourse,engage the audience and signal the writer’s attitude. At present, little work has been doneon comparative and contrastive analysis of the use of metadiscourse between English andChinese novels. The studies on metadiscourse that reflects the identities of the novelcharacter are relatively scant. This thesis will discuss how attitude markers help constructthe identity of characters in the novel, explore how they reflect the character’s attitudetowards things, enrich the frame of metadiscourse, and offer a new angle to analyze theChinese classical novel in order to deepen the understanding of the classical novels.This thesis, based on the Appraisal Theory and linguistic features of the classicalnovel The Story of the Stone, chooses Wang Xifeng’s speech in the first eighty chapters inthe novel written by Cao Xueqin and the translated by David Hawkes as the study target,builds a new taxonomy of attitude markers and divides it into six kinds: simple markers,affections, judgments, appreciations, interjections and euphemisms. Meanwhile, thisresearch tries to explore the way of identities construction of Wang Xifeng as a junior, peerand superior by attitude markers, and summarize the roles and regular patterns of howattitude markers construct identities in different contexts in English and Chinese editions.There are some similarities from the statistical results. First of all, it employs a rangeof attitude markers to express Wang Xifeng’s attitude to things in Chinese and Englisheditions. Specifically speaking, simple markers, affections, judgments and appreciationsare mostly used and interjections, euphemisms are relatively rare. Moreover, as a junior,Wang Xifeng flatters the Ladies with many judgments and appreciations, and also shows her abilities with a lot of affections.However, there do exist differences. Firstly, when Wang Xifeng is a junior, simplemarkers are added to point out the subject in English edition; more kinds of appreciationsare used to describe things in Chinese than those in English.Then, when Wang Xifeng is a peer, first, some appreciations are used in Chineseedition, but are omitted in English one; second, there are no appreciations in somediscourse in Chinese edition, but the translator appends some appreciations to simplyexpress Chinese slangs; third, lots of judgments in the Chinese edition are replaced bypropositions in English one when Wang Xifeng criticized others.Finally, when Wang Xifeng is a superior, firstly, some appreciations are removed inEnglish edition when criticizing someone; secondly, Wang Xifeng completely usesaffections to low down her position in order to set a trap for You Erjie in Chinese, to thecontrary, she yet uses affections together with simple markers, judgments andappreciations in English; thirdly, Wang Xifeng uses many euphemisms to express herstrong feelings and anger in the Chinese edition, but those are deleted in the Englishedition; fourthly, euphemism can convey her intimateness to the servant only in Chineseedition; lastly, the same interjections are repetitively used for showing anger in the Chineseedition while only once in English.With such similarities and differences discerned, this thesis argues that attitudemarkers actually help Wang Xifeng construct her different identities in different contextsand make her attitude, evaluation to things clearly. The differences in the use of attitudemarkers between the two editions may be due to linguistic and socio-cultural differencesimposing constraints on the choice of certain attitude markers.