AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE LANGUAGE OF AFFECT IN THE NOVEL“NỖI BUỒN CHIẾN TRANH” BY BẢO NINH AND THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONAL EQUIVALENTS IN THE APPRAISAL PERSPECTIVE
Novels in general and war novels in particular are places where writers express their opinions and attitudes, especially emotions towards people, things or incidents through major functions of language. Through novels, writers aim to establish solidarity and connection with potential or target readers. In order to well translate a novel, it is obligatory for translators to make meticulous analysis of evaluation and interaction factors between writers and readers. In war novels, in addition to using various stylistic devices such as metaphor, simile and some others, the language of evaluation or the Appraisal is also adopted to convey the writers’ message. Thanks to effects of the appraisal realizations, the language of attitudes and emotions of writers is more expressive as well as convincing.
Although the theory of Appraisal framework has been popular for about 20 years, it remains a new and interesting land for researchers and scholars to further explore. The Appraisal theory is the framework aiming to describe the various ways of linguistic realizations of interpersonal meanings in language use. It has three subsystems including Attitude, Engagement and Graduation and each subsystem has a few subcategories each of which performs a different evaluative function. Attitude is of great importance in appraisal framework and is the super-ordinate term for evaluative language in attitudinal positioning in text. Affect is a subcategory of Attitude which represents the emotional response to the person, thing, happening or state of affairs. In novels, the language of Affect is indicated via diversified lexical items and semantic patterns. The language in novels, especially in war novels is full of emotions towards soldiers, civilians, events, battle scenes… Hence Affect expressions are preferred by writers in order to depict the most panoramic and comprehensive picture of feelings, emotional problems of characters under different perspectives.
Followings are some examples of Affect used in the novel and the English translational version:
- Kiên đọc đi đọc lại. Tờ thư run lật phật, nhòa trong mắt anh.(p12)
- Kiên bật khóc. Anh không hiểu nổi lòng mình, không tự chủ được, nước mắt cứ ứa ra mãi.(p11)
- Và khi hai bên đường sắt bắt đầu những quang cảnh thân yêu của đồng bằng sông Hồng thì ai ai nấy như bơi trong niềm hạnh phúc.(p44)
- Kien read and reread the letter. His hands trembled, tears blurred his eyes. (p14)
- She smiled happily, her wavy hair surrounding her face and covering her shoulders. (p23)
- Kien mumbled. He hated any confidences, any sharing of personal problems. (p10)
Many studies on evaluation and interaction have been carried out. However, until now there have been not many researches predominantly focusing on only one subcategory of the Appraisal subsystems, especially no deep research has been done to analyze the Affect language in a war novel. Vietnamese learners of English, students who major in English as well as translators often find that it is difficult to thoroughly understand the attitudes or emotions expressed in English novels because people of different cultures have different patterns of conveying, understanding and interpreting their emotions.
For the aforementioned reasons, I decided to conduct a study with the topic “An investigation into the language of Affect in the novel “Nỗi buồn chiến tranh” by Bảo Ninh and the English translational equivalents under the view of the Appraisal Theory. This study focuses on analyzing emotional language of Affect only because expressions of emotions are said to appear with high frequency in war novels. Through the study, it is hoped that readers will be able to comprehend the methods how writers show different tones of emotions.
The study aims at investigating the expressions of Affect in the novel “Nỗi buồn chiến tranh” by Bảo Ninh and its translational version based mainly on the theory of Appraisal. The study is also aimed at finding the differences and similarities in the language of expressing emotions between Vietnamese and English through the novel in terms of semantic features, stylistics devices and grammatical realizations. The study’s findings contribute to the better understanding of Affect expressions, which facilitates the comprehension and translation of emotional language from Vietnamese to English and vice versa.
With the aforementioned aims, the study attempts to achieve the following objectives:
- Examine the language of Affect in the novel “Nỗi buồn chiến tranh” by Bảo Ninh and the English translational equivalents in terms of semantic features, stylistic devices and grammatical realizations.
- Compare and contrast the language of Affect used in the novel and how it was translated into English to clarify the similarities and differences in expressing Affect between Vietnamese and English in terms of semantic features, stylistic devices and grammatical realizations.
- Propose some implications of the findings for the teaching and learning of English concerning the Affect-emotional language
In order for all the aforementioned aims and objectives to be achieved, the following research questions were put forward:
1. What are the types and sub-types of Affect used in the novel and the translational equivalents under the view of the Appraisal Theory?
2. What are the semantic features and grammatical realizations of Affect in the novel and the English translational equivalents under the view of Appraisal Theory, Stylistics and Functional Grammar?
3. What are the similarities and differences of Affect in the novel and the English translational equivalents in terms of semantic features, stylistics and grammatical realizations?
1.4. The significance of the study
With the aims and objectives mentioned above, the study “An investigation into the language of Affect in the novel “Nỗi buồn chiến tranh” by Bảo Ninh and the English translational equivalents in the Appraisal perspective” is expected to be able to better understanding of the use of Affect-the expressions of emotion in English and Vietnamese. Also, the study’s findings are supposed to be the useful source of Affect language for the teaching and learning of EFl in general and Appraisal framework and translation concerning the Affect in particular.
The study focuses only on the analysis of Affect- the language of emotions, one of the sub-categories of Attitude in the Appraisal framework in terms of semantic features, grammatical realizations and stylistics. Semantically, the four categories in appraisal terms namely Happiness/Unhappiness, Security/Insecurity, Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction, Inclination/Disinclination in both English and Vietnamese were investigated in this study. The description of the grammatical realizations of Affect was based on the functional grammar framework in terms of clause as representation and conventional grammatical units. The study is confined within the data/instances taken from the novel “Nỗi buồn chiến tranh” by Bảo Ninh and the English translational equivalents.
1.6. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study is organized into five chapters including:
- Chapter one includes the rationale, the aims and objectives, the research questions, the significance and the scope of the study.
- Chapter two consists of two parts. The first part is a review of previous studies. The second one involves theoretical background related to issues to be investigated in the study.
- Chapter three describes the methodology of the study, the procedures of collecting and analyzing data.
- Chapter four deals with analyzing, interpreting and finding the frequencies of occurrence of sub-types of Affect in the novel and then classifying them based on their semantic and stylistic features and their grammatical realizations. A contrastive analysis of the use of Affectual values in the Vietnamese novel and the English translational equivalents. Finally, it presents the results and discusses the findings of the study.
- Chapter five gives a summary of the findings and conclusion drawn from the study. Also, the implications for the teaching and learning of EFl in general, Appraisal framework and translation in particular are suggested. Finally, some suggestions for further research are put forward.
LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1. Review of previous studies
The data of the study was collected from the novel “Nỗi buồn chiến tranh” by Bảo Ninh and the English translational version by Phan Thanh Hao, Vo Bang Thanh, with Kateria A. Peirce. The English version in 1996 was also edited by Frank Palmos. The English version by these authors was chosen for the reason that it is highly reliable and well-known all around the world.
Bao Ninh, the author, was a Vietnamese from the north. Ninh was born in 1952 in Ha Noi. During the Vietnam War against the United States, he served in the Glorious 27thYouth Brigade. Of the five hundred soldiers who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of ten who survived. Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War is about the war between North Vietnam with South Vietnam and the United States which took place throughout Vietnam between the 1960s and mid 1970s. The novel depicts the social atmosphere in Vietnam before, during and after the war. The author uses Kien, a young male soldier from the north, as the main character in the story. The plots of the story happen around Kien’s life before he joined the army, during his service in the army during wartime, and after the victory. Kien’s recall of his past memory about his youth, love, family, neighbors, friends in the army, and foes makes up the whole picture of the story. The novel portrays the tremendously destructive effect of war on human beings, nature, and each individual person. The main message that the novel strives to convey to readers is that the war brings nothing but an immense sorrow to a person’s life and that there is no winning side at all in a war. The war completely shatters a person’s hope, dream, and future. It is the war that causes unhealable separation, sorrow and great despair.
With such a plot, the language of Affect is expected to be dominant in the whole story. Affectual expressions are likely to appear with high frequency through diversified grammatical realizations in the war novel.
The theory of Appraisal is linguistically considered as a further development of the Hallidayan framework on functional grammar to understand more comprehensively the sophisticated means through which we express our personal viewpoints and respond to the viewpoints of others. This field of study is not able to be fully captured by the existing systems within the framework (Mood-Residue, Transitivity, Theme-Rheme, and Clause-Complexing). The unit of analysis here in the Appraisal framework is not limited to only the ranking clause, but the entire text. Any word, word group, or part of a word group can be sorted out as a sample of appraisal expressions. In many cases, there can be more than one possible answer. Analysis of appraisal is essentially interpretive, and the same text can be analysed very differently by different people.
In his book “An Introduction to Functional Grammar” (2004), Halliday stated that the basic functions of language are making sense of our experience, and acting out our social relationships. In other words, according to Halliday, language does construe human experience and language provides a theory framework of human experience and certain of the resources of the lexicogrammar of every language are dedicated to that function. The clause of the grammar has three functional components of meaning (called ‘metafunctions’ in systemic theory) which are the ideational (clause as representation), the interpersonal (clause as exchange) and the textual (clause as message). The ideational metafunction is further classifyied into two different components, namely experiential and logical. Halliday also made it clear that while construing, language is always also enacting: enacting our personal and social relationships with the other people around us. The clause of the grammar is not only a figure, representing some process — some doing or happening, saying or sensing, being or having — with its various participants and circumstances; it is also a proposition, or a proposal, whereby we inform or question, give an order or make an offer, and express our appraisal of and attitude towards whoever we are addressing and what we are talking about. Also, as quoted by Halliday, the logical component is called a group of words which is divided into 3 main classes: nominal group, verbal group and adverbial group; along with a brief reference to preposition and conjunction groups.
Because in this study, attitude is developed and viewed as a discourse semantic system, we can expect its realizations to diversify across a range of grammatical structures. This is certainly true of Affect. In terms of Halliday framework proposed in 1994 framework, these realizations comprise modification of participants and processes, Affective mental and behavioral processes, and modal Adjuncts. Appraisal theory has emerged from the elaboration of interpersonal resources, such as mood, modality and attitudinal lexis, within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Martin 1992a; Halliday 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Appraisal theory refers to delicate interpersonal resources of evaluative language at the level of grammar and discourse. From this perspective, interpersonal meaning is organised according to prosodic structure (see Martin 1992b, 1995, 2003). Prosodic structure or interpersonal structure spreads or diffuses interpersonal meanings over an extended text, and these meanings accumulate, reinforce, intensify or resonate with each other to construct an evaluative stance (Martin 1992b; Lemke 1998; Martin and Rose 2003/2007; Hood 2006).
This thesis is involved in the first metafunction: clause as representation in relation to the grammatical realizations of Affect. Affectual expressions in the novel and the English translational version are recognized and described through their grammatical realizations under the view of functional grammar.
a. Affect with function as Quality
The conscious participant experiencing the emotion is called an Emoter. Affect as quality can be utilized to describe participants. In addition, it might serve as being attributed to participants or stating manner of processes. Affect as quality consists of epithet and circumstance in Halliday (2004) terms. Halliday defines Epithet as indicating some quality of the subset, for example old, long, blue, fast. This may be an objective property of the thing itself; or it may be an expression of the speaker’s subjective attitude towards it, for example splendid, silly, fantastic. There are two types of epithet namely experiential and interpersonal. However, in this study, only interpersonal epithet is considered because this kind of epithet is said to express the speaker/writer’s attitude, which is related to Affectual expressions. Circumstance or circumstantial adjunct is realized by adverbial groups that modify the process.
b. Affect with function as Process
In clause as representation, process is centrally important. This is because it is process that largely decides the types of participants that are possible. Halliday refers to it as the system of transitivity. Under this view, there are many types of process such as material, mental, relational, behavioural, verbal and existential. Within this study, it is concerned with the two types of process as realizations of Affect namely Affective mental and Affective behavioral.
In the mental process, the participants are senser and phenomenon. Senser is the one who feels, thinks or perceives while phenomenon is the one which is felt, thought about or perceived. The mental has to do with Affection, cognition, perception or desideration- a fancy term for desiring.
Unlike the mental process, in the behavioural process, the main participant is behaver, and may sometimes involve a behaviour. The behavioural process is typically expressed by intransitive verbs.
c. Affect with function as Comment
In the framework of functional grammar regarding adverbial group by Halliday (2004), comment is one of the two functions of the adverbial group when serving as adjunct. It is therefore termed modal adjunct. According to Halliday, modal adjuncts are clause constituents which add interpersonal meanings to the clause. Comment adjuncts function to express an assessment about the clause as a whole. Comment adjuncts are regarded as interpersonal elements in the clause due to the fact that they add an expression of attitude and evaluation. Comment adjuncts typically occur in clause initial position or right after the subject, and are realized by adverbs.
d. Affect with function as Grammatical Metaphor
In addition to the aforementioned grammatical realizations via lexical tools, Affect can be also found through the usual range of grammatical metaphors. The linguist Halliday (An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 1994) defines grammatical metaphor as the substitution of one grammatical class or structure for another, often resulting in a more compressed expression. Within this study, grammatical metaphors include nominalised realizations of qualities (joy, sadness, sorrow) and processes (grief, sobs, constriction in his throat).
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