A Study On The Interpersonal Meaning Of Attitudinal Resources In The Play Of The Importance Of Being Earnest

Appraisal Theory is the development and extension of interpersonal meaning within Systemic Functional Linguistics by Martin and his colleagues.It contains three sub-systems-Attitude,Engagement and Graduation,among which Attitude is at the core.Appraisal Theory concerns semantic discourse,which explores the interpersonal meaning in spoken and written discourse.It systemically studies the appraisal language through the construction of a theoretical framework.After its construction,Appraisal Theory has been applied to the analysis of various kinds of genres,such as news,historical text,political discourse,literary works,etc.These studies testify the strong ability of Appraisal Theory in interpreting the interpersonal meaning of discourse.In its applications to literary works,researchers mainly focus on the analysis of fictions and short stories.However,few studies are conducted on the analysis of plays.As an important genre of literary works,plays mainly consist of dialogues which are the major way of constructing interpersonal relationship among protagonists.Therefore,the analysis of the interpersonal meaning in the dialogues of plays is worth of further study.The Importance of Being Earnest is one of Oscar Wilde’s representative works.It expresses Wilde’s satire to the aristocrats of upper class in the Victorian age.This thesis tries to explore the interpersonal meaning in the play of The Importance of Being Earnest through attitudinal system within Appraisal Theory so as to deepen the interpretation of the play from the perspective of linguistics.The thesis choses three representative dialogues among the main characters as corpus.Utilizing quantity and quality method,it marks the corpus with the help of UAM Corpus Tool and compares the distributional features of different attitudinal resources based on the statistical results and thus explores how the attitudinal resources contribute to constructing interpersonal relationship and the characters’ personalities revealed by these resources.The results show that:(1)the three dialogues contain many attitudinal resources,among which judgment takes the most part,accounting for 44.3%,followed by appreciation and affect.What’s more,positive resources are more than negative resources.These show that the characters tend to express judgment to things and their counterparts so as to construct interpersonal relationship with them.(2)Through the comparison of distribution and utilization of attitudinal resources in different characters,the power relations among them can be seen.The results show that in the three relationships between Jack and Algernon,Lady Bracknell and Jack,Cecily and Gwendolen.Algernon.Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen are at the dominant positions and manipulate the discourse in the dialogues;while Jack and Cecily are at subordinate positions to them.(3)Through sample analysis,the five characters’ personalities are revealed.The characterization of five characters shows Wilde’s satire to the upper class’s hypocrisy,snob and playful attitude to life during the Victorian age.Through applying Appraisal Theory to play of drama,the thesis broadens the application domains of Appraisal Theory and provides reference to exploring literary works from the perspective of linguistics.Moreover,it also provides some suggestions for appreciating literary works in literature teaching based on the analysis of the attitudinal resources.