Abstract:Among different branches of sociolinguistics, the study of social dialects provides us with an important theoretical tool to understand human language. With the rising social status of blacks, Black English, as a typical ethnic dialect, has attracted more and more attention. But the study of Black English has not been given enough attention by scholars in China.
In the early 1970s, Halliday made a transitivity analysis of Golding’s The Inheritor. Transitivity approach of discourse analysis was thus established. In this paper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is taken as the concrete text for transitivity analysis. The aim is to explore more about Black English. At the same time, theories about transitivity system can be put into practice.
Key words: Black English; social dialect; transitivity analysis
摘要:在社会语言学的各分支中，社会方言学研究给我们了解人类语言提供了一个重要的理论视角。随着黑人地位的提高，黑人英语作为典型的以民族为背景的社会方言，也日益受到重视。但在中国，对社会语言变体的研究相对较少。本文坚持社会语言学的立场，认为各种语言变体都是合法的，并通过对黑人英语的研究进一步了解社会方言的民族性特点。
韩礼德在七十年代早期，对戈尔丁的小说《继承者》进行了及物性分析，并成为典范。自从韩礼德首次从语义层面论述及物性以来，越来越多的学者把及物性理论运用到语篇分析中。本文试图运用韩礼德的语言理论对《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》中的黑人英语进行分析，期待揭示19世纪美国黑人英语在及物性系统分析下的一些方言特征，以便为理解特定时期的社会方言增添一个新的视角。
关键词：黑人英语，社会方言,及物性分析
Sociolinguistics studies the inter relation between society and language. The discipline is meaningful as well as complicated. The study of social dialects looks at exploring important sociolinguistic phenomenon from a worm’s eye view of language used by individuals in daily life. Among various social dialects, Black English is one of the most typical to mirror the ethnic background. In the long history, it has experienced discrimination and misunderstanding. However, these can not hinder its development. Linguists do not view some languages as superior to or better than others. For them all language is equal. And their task is to describe language rather than prescribe what people should say in daily life.
In this paper, to explore the deep structure of Black English, sociolinguistics is combined with Hallidayan approach of transitivity. It may provide a new method to study sociolinguistics. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is taken as the concrete text for its abundance in various social dialects and Black English. Discovery is also made that Black English has something in common with the standard English in the choice of transitivity processes. Material Processes are used to reconstruct the sequence of events and Relational Processes (especially Attributive Relational Processes) are also used to describe relations. But there is also something unique. In the analysis of Mental Processes, it was found that the third person was frequently uses. It is a reflection of white people’s great influence on the black at that time, which has much to do with the social conditions. It’s also true that social segmentation and discrimination have great influence on Black English.
