| One of the purposes of Systemic Functional Linguistics founded by Halliday, English linguist, is to provide an analytical framework for the study of language. Halliday believes that language is a system, mainly expressing three kinds of meaning:ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning. In Systemic Functional Grammar, meaning is the function, so the three meanings are known as the three meta-functions. The interpersonal function is an important part of Systemic Functional Grammar, and it is an important theoretical basis for discourse analysis. Interpersonal function means using the words to relate to people and to express the speaker’s identity, position, attitude, motivation, inference of the things and perception of the world. In addition, interpersonal metaphor in Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edition) has been applied in this thesis. Interpersonal metaphor can be divided into metaphors of mood and metaphors of modality. The former is the embodiment of the modality system that has a variety of forms, such as modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and so on, while mood system can convert each other by a variety of language behaviors.My Fair Lady is a film adapted from Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. It is a comedy like Cinderella:The protagonist, Eliza, is a humble flower girl who once speaks the vulgar accent. However, she has become an elegant and well-behaved lady under the training of the linguist Higgins. At last, she is not only praised by the upper class, but also gains her wonderful love.This thesis intends to analyze the dialogues between the two major characters in My Fair Lady through adopting the interpersonal function perspective, namely, the speech function of interpersonal function, mood system, modality system and interpersonal metaphor. Based on the statistics of frequency distribution about the different sentence types, modal verbs and modal additional language, we can know how the author expresses incisively and vividly characters of Higgins and Eliza. This thesis reveals how the interpersonal function theory reflects the way of the characters in the film, thus providing a new way to appreciate literary works. |
