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Metafunctional Analysis on English Movie Reviews

Author: JiangKuang
Tutor: JiangLing
School: Henan University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: movie reviews metafunctions Systemic-Functional Grammar
CLC: H315
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 119
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Abstract

With the rapid development of film industry and the acceleration of the pace of society, more and more movie reviews appear in newspapers and other popular mass-media outlets and they have been playing an increasingly important role in people’s life. A movie review is a way in which the writer expresses his/her opinion of a movie with a short summary of its plot and characters as well as comments on the movie. The purpose of most movie reviews is to help the audience to determine whether they want to watch the movie or not. In addition, from a review the audience can get roughly the content and other information about the movie. However, we have long habitually concentrated on the journalistic value and the literary value of the movie review, and cast little attention to its linguistic value as a special discourse pattern. The linguistic analysis of movie reviews can enable us to have a full and deep understanding of its discourse model and language features, so that we could pick up as much discourse information as possible from it.This thesis employs the Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) as its theoretical framework. In the preface of the book Introduction to Functional Grammar, Halliday (1994: 36) points out that“…it was being written specifically for those who are studying Grammar for the purpose of text analysis…”Fang Yan (方琰, 2005) points out since the successful application of this framework into the analysis of ad. discourse by Huang Guowen, this Grammar is more suitable than any other linguistic framework for discourse analysis (DA). Yet, up to now, and to my knowledge, there are no linguists or linguistic scholars at home or abroad who have applied this theory into the analysis of English movie reviews. Through the study, we have the evidence that the Systemic-Functional Grammar can be applied to the analysis of English movie reviews. For one thing, this could definitely enrich Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and enhance the practicability and universality of this theory. For the other, it could enable us to have a better comprehension of the discourse pattern and its language features.Data for the research in this thesis come from an American newspaper—USA Today published in December, 2009. USA Today is a national American daily newspaper and has been taking up the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States. So the movie reviews in this newspaper are representative and have the higher authority than those in other newspapers.This paper consists of five chapters.Chapter one is an overall introduction, including the motivation, objectives, theoretical approach, methodology, data source, research questions and a brief introduction to the organization of the thesis.Chapter two presents the literature review of major studies on present study from the perspectives of review and movie review respectively.Chapter three concerns the theoretical framework of this thesis. In this chapter, the theory adopted is presented, namely the Systemic-Functional Grammar by Halliday.Chapter four provides a practical analysis of English movie review discourse firmly based on the theoretical framework. Firstly, transitivity analysis is conducted. Among the six processes, material processes and relational processes are the most frequently used processes in English movie reviews. Mental processes, existential processes and verbal processes only take up a small proportion. Behavioral processes are rarely used.Mood analysis and modal analysis come second. Present tense is heavily used in movie reviews, which adds to freshness and immediacy of the movie reviews. Modal operators and modal adjuncts are not quite often used, and this indicates the objectivity of the writers. There are one hundred percent declaratives. This also manifests the objectivity. Finally we move to the thematic and thematic progression analysis of the discourse. Most of the themes in movie reviews are unmarked. As to thematic progression, constant-Theme patterns are the most frequently employed.Chapter five draws the conclusion and points out the limitations that are still existing, which in turn gives us a clue to what we will proceed in the direction in the future.These findings on the one hand successfully prove the applicability of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar in the analysis of this discourse pattern, and on the other, serve as a great help for the audiences to get a better understanding of the discourse.

Metafunctional Analysis on English Movie Reviews

Abstract

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