A Study On Chinese American Female's Discourse In The Joy Luck Club From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistics

The Joy Luck Club marked the beginning of the famous Chinese American writer Amy Tan's fame.Nowadays,it has become a classic of American literature.In the novel,the author delicately described the immigrant life and growth experience of the four pairs of Chinese mothers and their American born daughters by telling stories.In the book,the unique language style of Chinese American female and the cultural gap of Chinese American families were fully embodied by the dialogues between Chinese mothers and their American born daughters.To some extend,it also deeply reflected the real life issues of Chinese American families who were living in America.Therefore,it is worthy to dig out the context,function and connotation of their dialogues from the perspective of functional stylistics.What's more,it has a certain research value to reveal the interaction process between the inner world and the real world.Functional Stylistics is a branch of modern Stylistics theory based on Halliday's systemic functional grammar.It regards language as a meaning potential system,and focuses on the study of the process of language selection and the stylistic effects of selection results.It analyzes the process of discourse constructionist from the new perspective of context and metafunction theory.This thesis employs the functional stylistics to analyze the Chinese American Females' discourse and further discusses the social reasons that result of language features so that people can achieve better daily communication.The body of this thesis analyzes the discourse of the Chinese American female from the point of the ideational function and interpersonal function.Through careful observation and analysis,the author has the following findings.Firstly,their discourse features are mostly passive and submissive.Secondly,the Chinese American females use more parallel sentences and vague words so that they can get the hearers' attention and express their own politeness.Thirdly,their language features are very short,simple,incomplete and colloquial,which shows the differences between emigrant English and native English.Fourthly,Chinese American mothers and daughters have theequal discourse power and maintain a positive attitude when they communicate.What's more,both the mothers and daughters' discourses reveal the positive affections towards their own capacity.Besides,through the analysis of context,this paper also finds that Chinese mothers and daughters show different attitudes towards Chinese and English languages because of their different cognition of their social identities,and they can express different communicative intentions on different occasions through code switching.The paper is divided into five parts.The first part is introduction,which mainly introduces the research background,methods,problems and significance.The second part is literature review,which briefly reviews the previous studies on Amy Tan,her works and functional stylistics at home and abroad.The third part is the theoretical framework,which mainly outlines the basic theories of functional stylistics.The fourth part is the main body of the thesis.It analyzes the discourse of Chinese American female from the perspective of ideational function,interpersonal function and context,and further explores its social reasons.The fifth part is conclusion.This part summarizes the findings and limitations of the research,and puts forward some profound suggestions for the future research.