An Analysis Of Blackmail From The Perspective Of Register Theory

Blackmail, as an excellent story, is the excerpt of the famous novel Hotel written by Arthur Hailey. His works always set in the American society, expose the internal contradictions and crisis of the industries, and thereby reflect every aspect of the American society. Therefore, he is labeled the "social problem novelist". Recently, many researchers attempt to analyze his works from different perspectives, such as translation equivalence, stylistic, pragmatics etc. This thesis aims at providing a new angle from Systematic Functional Linguistics. The excerpt of this novel is analyzed through register theory together with the three metafunctions of language.Register theory is one of the most significant theories of Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar, providing theoretical support in analyzing text. The concept of register is derived from the development of the concept of context. Halliday has devoted himself to the detailed study of register theory. He defines register as the variety of language which distinguished by usage and emphasizes that language changes as the context changes. Meanwhile, the contextual factors influence the function of language. He puts out that there are three variables in register theory, namely, field, tenor and mode. They change as the register changes. Among them, field refers to the matters which actually happen, including the situation of language occurring, the speaker and other participants’whole activities which equals to the subject matter, and determines the language features of the text; tenor refers to the relationships between the participants, including the social status and the role relations; mode refers to the channel or the method for communication. These three variables restrict the metafunctions of language separately, that is, the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function.Applying register theory to text analysis can avoid the subjective assume, and integrate the language form and meaning together. This thesis uses the three variables of register theory to analyze the text Blackmail, including the detailed elaboration about the setting and subject matter of this novel, the characters’relationships, language features and functions, as well as the character’s personalities etc. Meanwhile, in order to reveal how field, tenor and mode can be realized through the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function, this thesis analyzes the transitivity system, mood and modality system, thematic structure and cohesion based on the corresponding relations between the variables and the metafunctions, and accordingly provides a new perspective from Functional Linguistics for better interpretation of the register variables of Blackmail.This thesis is made up of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction. It mainly generalizes and summarizes the relevant studies about register theory and the definition of text, puts forward the objectives and methods of this thesis, points out the significance of analyzing text from the perspective of register theory, and proposes the theoretical value and practical value of this study. As to the theoretical value, this thesis aims at offering the theoretical support and the detailed operation methods. As to the practical value, register theory enlarges the way of text analysis, especially has a great effect on the analysis and research about the literary works.The second part is the main body, which consists of four chapters:In Chapter One, literature review is analyzed. This chapter includes three sections. The first section states the definition of register and its historical development. The second section elaborates the three variables, language metafunctions, and the corresponding relationships between them. The third section is the brief introduction to the author and the text Blackmail.In Chapter Two, field of Blackmail is analyzed. The content includes the setting and the subject matter, as well as the transitivity system of ideational function and the lexical choices associated with the subject matter of the excerpt which are used to realize the field.In Chapter Three, tenor of Blackmail is analyzed through the main characters’ relationships together with their power influence on changing the role and interactive relations. In addition, how to realize the tenor through mood and modality system of the interpersonal function, as well as the address forms used in this text are discussed in this chapter.In Chapter Four, the mode of Blackmail is elaborated through several instances of dialogues quoted from this text and the application of third-person omniscient narrator perspective. The realization of mode relies on the textual function which contains the thematic structure and the cohesion analysis of the text.The last part is the conclusion of the whole thesis based on the preceding study. It mainly summarizes the content of this thesis. Through the analysis of field, tenor and mode of this excerpt, as well as how to realize them from the integrating language metafunctions, this thesis reaches the unity of the form and the meaning in text analysis. It provides the support of systematic theory and supplies the effective methods for studying text, and offers guidance to analyze or understand text from the perspective of Systematic Functional Linguistic better.