Attitude System-based Analysis Of O-lan's Personalities In The Good Earth

Pearl S.Buck's masterpiece The Good Earth was published in March,1931 in New York and was sold to 1,800,000 at that year.She won the Pulitzer next year and then carried off the Nobel Prize in 1938,which makes her reach the highest peak of literature.The achievement greatly depends on the description of rural China in The Good Earth,the narration of Chinese farmers' land complex,the attention of Chinese women's destiny and the sympathy and love for them.Although a lot of researchers at home and abroad have studied it from different perspectives,few researchers analyze heroine O-lan's personalities from the perspective of linguistics based on the Appraisal theory.Therefore,the thesis makes a tentative analysis of O-lan's personalities by the Attitude system's three sub-systems,including affect,judgment and appreciation.Professor J.R.Martin put forward the Appraisal theory in 1990 s,which is the extension and expansion of the interpersonal meaning of Systemic Functional Grammar of Halliday.The Attitude system is one of the three sub-systems of the Appraisal theory,including reaction of affect,judgment of behavior and evaluation of phenomenon.It is also the core system of the Appraisal theory.The Attitude system is that,people make a judgment or appreciation for human behavior,text or process and phenomenon after their minds are affected.The centre of the Attitude system is affect resources.Judgment resources and appreciation resources are both based on the affect resources.Many researchers at home and abroad have made a lot of researches.However,few researchers analyze characters' personalities based on the Attitude system.According to the qualitative and quantitative analysis,the research selects the attitudinal resources depicting heroine O-lan's personalities and uses the abbreviation of relevant nouns to show them.Then it finds the distribution characters,language features and communicative meanings of the attitudinal resources and analyzes how Pearl S.Buck depicts heroine O-lan's personalities.O-lan's character has been studied from two aspects.On the one hand,O-lan is silent,submissive and is bullied under the influence of the feudal traditional culture that male are supposed to be worth more than the other sex.On the other hand,although O-lan's power isthin and she cannot get rid of the strong tie of habitual force,she effectively fights back the unjust and unequal treatment by her own courage and wisdom.Data analysis reveals the following findings:(1)The dialogue of the novel applies abundant and various attitudinal resources(169)interacting with each other to depict heroine O-lan's submissive and resistant personalities.(2)The frequencies of the affect resources and the judgment resources are similar.Among them,the highest frequency(53.3%)of the judgment resources within the Attitude system indicates Pearl S.Buck's writing style that she manages to create heroine O-lan's personalities by keen and close observations and judgment of her behaviors and manners in The Good Earth.The affect resources are the second(44.9%)and the appreciation resources are the lowest(1.8%).In addition,Pearl S.Buck tends to employ the negative attitudinal resources to shape heroine O-lan's image.Among all the attitudinal resources(169),negative resources(109)take up a percentage of 64.5%.(3)Pearl S.Buck prefers to apply adjectives and adverbs to depict heroine O-lan's submissive and resistant personalities.Besides,she also tends to employ nominalization,repetition and so on to describe it.On the one hand,the research throws a new light on appreciating heroine O-lan's personalities and the linguistic features of The Good Earth.On the other hand,it provides some significant implications for the literature teaching in the future.