The Characterization Of The Protagonist Christopher In The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time From The Perspective Of Transitivity

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time(hereafter The Curious Incident)is a detective novel which written by British writer Mark Harden and it is the first novel in his writing career.It tells the story of a 15-year-old boy looking for a killer alone after finding neighbor's dog Wellington was killed by a garden fork.Mark Harden tells the story from a first-person perspective.Through the diary-like language in the novel,readers can easily get into the inside world of 15-year-old boy with cognitive disability.In systemic functional linguistics,language is regarded as a system with potential meaning and it has three meta-functions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.With this idea,Transitivity as the main expression of conceptual function is the description of the external environment and internal experience of language users.The author conducts the research based on transitivity system of SFL,and shows how the choice of linguistic patterns contribute to characterization of Christopher.In the first part of the thesis,the author takes a detailed analysis of the different types of clauses that appear in the novel in terms of material process,mental process,and relational process.First,through the analysis of the features of elements in the clauses of the material process,the protagonist's cognitive defects in the external environment,attention to detail and obstacles in communication with people are found.In the process of exploring emotive clauses,perceptive clauses and cognitive clauses in mental process clauses,the research shows the image of the protagonist's likes and dislikes and his way of understand the world with facts.Next,the author argues that relational process clauses in the novel present the protagonist' s logic of understanding the world and the way in using external details understand other characters.Finally,by summarizing the analysis of the three processes,the study finds that Christopher's characterization displayed in the clauses of the three processes can conclude into three main aspects---the defects in the cognitive ability of the protagonist of the novel,selfcenteredness,and the love of nice order.In the second part of the study,the author uses The Curious Incident as a small corpus.With the help of UAM corpus tool v3.3,the author counts the proportion of the clauses in the three processes in the novel and verify the protagonist' s limitation of cognitive capability and his love of nice order.And by using wordlists function in Wordsmith,the research analyze compare the highfrequency vocabulary in the novel with the COCA corpus and founds that the excessively used words also reflect the defects of the protagonist's cognitive ability and self-centered characteristics.As a novel with a wide range of readers,the protagonist Christopher' s image has brought a lot of happiness and touching to both young and adult readers.As a character with cognitive defects,he not only brings readers a different understanding of life,but also raises social attention to marginalized groups.