| The last two decades of 20 thcentury had witnessed the rise and boom of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA for short), which was taken as a new linguistic trend. One of the biggest characteristics of CDA is that it takes context as a social practice, and pays more emphasis on the big part which social environment has played in the generation and development of language. CDA lays its focus on the interaction of the concepts of language, ideology and power, in the hope of exploring power relations, hierarchies and gender inequality which have been hidden in the discourse. In recent decades, studies and research on CDA have been in full swing, one can find out most of which are involved in public discourses such as news discourses and speech discourses.The Color Purple was published in 1982, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983, which made Alice Walker famous as the first black female writer who had ever won the Pulitzer Prize in America. The story happened in southern rural areas of America at the beginning of 20 thcentury. Our heroine, Celie is a poor black woman who has long time been under the double oppression of racism and sexism. She was raped by her stepfather at the age of14 and gave birth to two babies. However, her stepfather sends her babies away and forces her to marry a widower named Mr.-. After marriage, Mr.- abuses Celie in all sorts of ways and even his children could bully Celie deliberately. Celie submits to humiliation and has to write to the God to pour out her sorrow and grief. Later with the help of Mr.-’s mistress,Shug and Mr.-’s daughter-in-law, Sofia, Celie realizes her self-value and leaves Mr.-.Finally, she becomes a new woman with independent thoughts. There involve two themes:racism and sexism in this novel, which is coincident with what CDA always advocates that CDA aims to dig out unequal power relations and hegemony hidden behind the discourse.Moreover, Alice Walker consciously emphasizes and portrays the changes of Celie’s language in the process of her identity awakening. Therefore, it seems workable and feasible to analyze this novel from the perspectives of CDA.This thesis mainly takes advantages of SFG: one of CDA’s analytical method and theoretical tool, the whole analysis is organized in three aspects: transitivity system,modality system and mood system. In this way, the author attempts to analyze the complicated identity changes and power relations in this novel. First of all, through the analysis of the three main process types(material process, mental process and relational process) of transitivity system, this thesis aims to find out how Celie tends to employ mental processes and relational processes to show her feelings and affections in the beginning to later frequently using material processes to show dynamic actions she takesand the effects she exerts on things and people around her, which suggests Celie is eager to obtain equal identity and power as men. In the second place, in the aspects of modality system, this thesis analyzes how Celie often uses low modal operators from the beginning to show her uncertainty and non-confidence to later using too many median or high modal operators to show her confidence in herself and certainty about things. Thirdly, this thesis analyzes from mood system of how Celie employs most interrogatives to ask for information from others at the beginning to later employing declaratives and imperatives to show her judgments and suggestions or commands. Thus based on this analysis, this thesis puts forward this viewpoint that SFG can effectively analyze the process of characters’ language changes and further reveal identity variation and power changes in the discourse. |
PDF Full Text Request