A Study on the Ideational Metafunction in A Street Cat Named Bob_英语论文

摘要

小说，是以刻画人物形象为中心，通过描写故事情节和环境来反映社会生活的文学体裁。通常来说，有关人类与动物的写实小说一般都会展示两者的友情，尽管它与其他小说有所区别，小说中的人物必定生活在一定的客观现实世界里, 有着自己独特的内心世界, 在一定的时间和空间里以各种方式与周围的人和事物发生着多种联系。我们使用语言对人们在现实世界（包括内心世界）中各种经历进行表达，对事件和状态以及它们之间内部联系进行描述。本文将以韩礼德提出的概念功能作为理论框架，对小说《流浪猫鲍勃》中描写两位主人公第一次相遇的选段进行及物性和语态分析，旨在探索和分析小说中重要人物的形象, 并了解作者是怎样展示主题。读者可以从中了解到该类小说的描写习惯以及揭示句子内在意义的方法。

关键词：小说  概念功能  及物性  语态  韩礼德

Abstract

Novel is a kind of literature that aims to depict characters and reflect social life through plots and environment. Non-fiction human-animal novels usually reflect the friendship between human and animals. Though it is different from other novels, characters all live in a world with unique internal thoughts, and they have various connections with people and things around them during a period of time and in a specific space. We need to use language to talk about our experience of the world, including the worlds in our own minds; and to describe events, states, and the entities involved in them. Based on ideational function from Halliday, the paper analyzes an excerpt that describes the scene when two main characters first meet each other from the novel A Street Cat Named Bob from two aspects—transitivity and voice, hoping to find out the characteristics of the main characters and how the author successfully reveals the theme of the work. Readers can learn the conventions of describing non-fiction human-animal novels as well as the way of knowing the inner meaning of sentences.

Key words: novel  ideational function  transitivity  voice  Halliday

Contents

Chapter One  Introduction 1

1.1  Purpose of This Thesis 1

1.2  Significance of This Thesis 1

1.3  Research Method of This Thesis 2

1.4  Structure of This Thesis 2

Chapter Two  Literature Review 4

2.1  Introduction 4

2.2  Previous Studies on Animal Literature 4

2.3  Ideational Function in Discourse Analysis 5

2.4  Comment 6

Chapter Three  Theoretical Framework 7

3.1  Introduction 7

3.2  Systemic-functional Grammar 7

3.3  The Three Metafunctions 8

3.4  Ideational Metafunction 9

Chapter Four  Discourse Analysis of A Street Cat Named Bob 10

4.1  Introduction 10

4.2  Analysis of the Excerpt 10

4.2.1 Transitivity Analysis 11

4.2.2 Voice Analysis 15

4.2.3 Summary of the Research 18

Chapter Five  Conclusion 20

Bibliography

Appendices

Acknowledgements