The Study Of The Literary Image Of Ichabod Crane In The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

This thesis, exemplifying Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, attempts to testify that by adopting transitivity system theory, the accuracy of the image of the main character, Ichabod Crane that the reader keeps in his mind can be tested objectively from the perspective of linguistics.Transitivity system theory that is a semantic system belongs to the Ideational Metafunction, which is one of the three Metafunctions in Systemic Functional Grammar. Transitivity system theory puts what people have seen, heard, done into six "processes". And the theory points out "participants" and "phenomenon" relate to all the people’s actions. Six processes belong to transitivity system theory, and they are: Material Process, Mental Process, Relational Process, Behavioral Process, Verbal Process and Existential Process. Among the six processes, Material, Mental and Relational Processes are the main process types of transitivity system theory.Transitivity system theory is a classical method in Systemic Functional Stylists. Many scholars have used transitivity system theory as an effective method to analyze literary texts. As early as1970, Halliday published his influential essay on the thematic function of transitivity pattern in William Golding’s The Inheritors. He pointed out that transitivity system theory is a powerful tool to interpret literary works. However, people use transitivity system theory mainly to uncover power relations between conflicting parties. However, hardly any effort has been made to investigate formation of characters.In the process of appreciating and decoding literary text, the reader builds the images of characters according to the description of the text’s writer. However, the formation of character images is normally subconscious, subjective and lack of evidences. Therefore, this thesis attempts to verify the validity of the image that the reader builds in his mind from the perspective of linguistics.In literary works,"events" are the main resource of formation of characters and so makes the greatest contribution to formation of characters."Events" here refer to occurrences that are character-related and they involve people’s doings and happenings under some "phenomenon". In accordance with functional grammar, there is "transitivity" concerning "events" and different types of "process" realize transitivity.This thesis aims to demonstrate how to use transitivity system theory to analyze formation of characters at the linguistic level by employing three main process types (Material Process, Mental Process and Relational Process) in transitivity system theory and to analyze the external characteristics of the main character, Ichabod Crane, in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow from three aspects:his appearance, singing and dancing as well as the personal character of the story from eight perspectives, such as the way Ichabod treats his students in the classroom, the way of Ichabod pursuing Katrina and his behavior when he encounters with the Headless Horseman, etc.As a result, the thesis proves that the weird, coward and hypocritical image about Ichabod Crane kept in the reader’s mind is valid and proves that by use of transitivity system theory to do researches about formation of characters is of great effectiveness.This thesis broadens the range of the study of literary texts, and provides a new and effective way for literary text analysis.