On Chinese Farmers’ Traditional Ideas In The Good Earth From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

The Good Earth, written by Pearl S Buck, has been one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century since its publication. In this novel, the writer tells a timeless story about a farmer struggling to eke out a living from the earth. Hardworking and wildly ambitions, Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, pull themselves out of poverty, and toil relentlessly to build a fortune without ever losing faith in the restorative power of the land.Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics is the most important theoretical foundation of Critical Discourse Analysis. He summarized three meta-functions of language, namely ideational, interpersonal and textual. Ideational function is realized by transitivity, interpersonal function by mood and modality and textual function by theme-rheme. In Fowler’s opinion, the ideological meaning hidden in lexical classification, transitivity, modality, transformation, systematization and consistency should be particularly paid attention to when analyzing the discourse under the approach of CDA.The previous studies mainly pay much attention to its literary language. As for CDA, its purpose is to discover the ideology hidden in the mass media discourse and it has been seldom used to analyze literary discourse. Therefore, the author takes the Critical Discourse Analysis as the approach, and the theory of systemic functional grammar as the framework to analyze the language in the novel The Good Earth, focusing on the Chinese farmers’ traditional ideas, by employing lexical classification, transitivity, modality and transformation. Meanwhile, the author chooses some chapters as the data. On the theory and method mentioned above, the author tries to analyze the relationships between language and the Chinese farmers’ traditional ideas and reveal the ideology of Chinese society which guide and control people’s behaviors and thoughts and explore whether the change of language can construct the farmers’ traditional ideas.There are four chapters. Chapter one is literature review, which includes a brief introduction to CDA, studies on the novel and previous studies on CDA. Chapter two introduces the framework of theory to this research. This chapter deals with the relations between Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Linguistics, then the overview of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Chapter three discusses how SFG elements are related to the farmers’ traditional ideas, the data collection and methodology employed in this thesis. Chapter four is about major findings, implications and limitations of the study.