语境在叙事语篇中的语言体现

Linguistic Reflections of Context in Narration

0.1 本文拟用韩礼德的功能语法理论对美国当代名著《夜幕下的大军》作一分析,以探讨语境和语篇的关系。1967年美国首都华盛顿发生了一场声势浩大的向五角大楼进军的反对越南战争的示威游行,前后持续了四天。小说记述了这一场四五万人参加的反战行动,同时也叙述了作为参加者与见证人的作者诺曼·梅勒本人在这四天中的经历和感受,以及触景生情而发的议论。此书1968年获美国非虚构小说普利策奖。

Next morning, Macdonald and Lowell met Mailer in the dining room of the Hay-Adams for breakfast. There was a crowd about now. In the lobby, a mood prevailed of well-dressed people come together for a collective celebration— a homecoming game or civic testimonial, or class reunion. Everybody was saying hello to people they had not seen in years, and everybody looked good. The thousand days of John Kennedy had done much to change the style of America; nowhere perhaps more than to the sartorial sense of the liberals and Left Wing intellectuals now gathering for breakfast—some drabness had quit them since the fifties, some sense of power had touched them with subtle concomitants of power— a hint of elegance. (Continued on p 9) The city was awake. On the way to the hotel last night, somewhat after midnight, Mailer thought the streets of downtown Washington held a hint of Times Square in early morning hours, that same offering of fevers not abated,echo of voices a block away which promised violence—if not for tonight, then for another: The whores were out: not a common sight in Washington. The Capital was usually about as lively at 1 A.M. as the center of Cincinnati late at night, but now there were motorcycles gunning up and down the avenues with their whine-of constant climax looping into the new whine of higher climax—one waits for them to explode, they never do, they go gunning for the night. The air was violent, yet full of amusement; out of focus. Mailer had no idea whether this atmosphere was actually now typical of Washington on Friday night (as lately of more than one other quiet American city) or whether this mood came in with the weekend migrants from New York; or if indeed some of the Under-Thirties in Washington were warming up to repel the invasion. There was a hint of hurricane calm, then wind-bursts, gut-roars from the hogs. If the novelist had never heard of Hell's Angels or motorcycle gangs, be would still have predicted, no, rather invented motorcycle orgies, because the orgy and technology seemed to come together in the sound of 1200 cc's on two wheels, that exacerbation of flesh, torsion of lust, rhythm in the pistons, stink of gasoline, yeah, oil as the last excrement of putrefactions buried a million years in Mother Earth, yes indeed, that funky redolence of gasoline was not derived from nothing, no, doubtless it was the stench of the river Styx (a punning metaphor appropriate to John Updike no doubt) but Mailer weak in Greek, had nonetheless some passing cloudy unresolved image now of man as Charon on that river of gasoline Styx wandering between earth and the holy mills of the machine. Like most Cloudy metaphors, this served to get him home— there is nothing like the search for a clear figure of speech to induce gyroscopic intensily sufficient for the compass to work.