ittle empirical researchhas been done to investigate what the distribution patterns of GM are in LCEs, whether theGM patterns may endow any stylistic value with LCE discourse (since there has been norelevant study to investigate whether LCE can be treated as an independent style), whatimplications readers of LCEs can gain from the investigation of GM, for it is alwaysmurderously difficult for graduates to fully understand those professional essays and what implications can be of help to those would-be writers to compose articles pertinent to literarycriticism. It is against this background that the current study embarks. LCEs has long been treated as a general type of written language and has not been givenenough attention from the perspective of linguistics. In English teaching, LCEs have beenapproached from the perspective of reading comprehension for higher level intensive readingand short passage writing in exams. In recent years, with the exchange and communication inlinguistic study and literary criticism between China and western world deepening, morecriticism materials have been introduced and those materials are often quite difficult tounderstand and interpret even for graduates. So the author believes that LCEs deservesresearch from linguistic point of view so that the rules underlying sentence patterns in thosetexts of criticism can be found and is of help for language teaching.
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Chapter Two Theoretical Framework of Research Proceduresand Data Analysis
2.1Introduction of the materials for corpus
The set of books The Cambridge Companion was introduced into mainland of China byShangHai Foreign Language Education Press from University of Cambridge. Right now, thisset of books includes 40 books, the content of which is associated with 33 famous British andAmerican writers in history, studies about Greek Tragedy, English poetry,Eighteenth-Century Novel, British Romanticism, Modernism, American Realism andNaturalism, American Women Playwrights, Australian Literature, and Jewish AmericanLiterature. The writers of the articles in the book are distinguished scholars and experts intheir own fields. Take the book The Cambridge Companion to modernism for example. Itexamines the different aspects of modernist thought and culture that have had a significantimpact on contemporary cultural thinking and production. Topics discussed by experts in thefield include modernism’s relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance toliterature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. This is anessential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in modernism inall its incarnations. Thus the book can be regarded as the most representative and authoritativecritical articles of English literature.
2.2 Data collection and analysis procedures
To ensure that the findings can be representative and 40 pieces of essays with differenttopics from 40 books were chosen randomly as objects to be studied.The analysis procedures are in two stages. First, ideational GM and interpersonal GM inthe chosen critical essays are identified in their quantity. The former is to be further ascertained what transferences of transitivity are involved in the formation of ideational GM;the latter is studied to find what mechanism is involved in the process of forminginterpersonal GM, so that it can be concluded whether GM has been a prominent features ofmodern literature critical article, what are the internal mechanism to make GM possible inthose essays to be studied and whether the GM pattern can enable LCEs to possess distinctstylistic markers. Cases of nominalization and word density are to be explained in qualitativemethod in order to find out whether nominalization, as Halliday proclaimed, is “the singlemost powerful way of forming GM and what is the effect exerted by nominalization on worddensity
