英语论文网

knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh, yes, I kicked him! And In my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the corner with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, let him fall back to the street. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabled through the darkness. He lay there, moaning on the asphalt, a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was amused: Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been ‘mugged.’ Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man (Ellison 2005: 7 - 8). In this paragraph, all the verbs that follow the first person pronoun “I” are italicized. There are 29 verbs in all, by which the author expresses a particular range of ideational meanings, the process of the external world and the process of the narrator’s consciousness, seeing, thinking, talking and so on. All the verbs that follow the first personal pronoun “I” can be classified into five processes, as is shown in the table: Process Frequency Process Frequency Material process 17 Behavior process 2 Mental process 5 Verbal process 2 Relational process 3 Existential process 0 The first sentence can be analyzed as a configuration of the functions: Actor: “I” (the narrator) Process: Material: creation: bumped Goal: affected: a man Here the actor, process and goal reflect our understanding of phenomena that come within our experience. It would be a common accident without the following reason, the man’s insult. “I” sprang and seized him, and demanded his apologize. “Demanded” expresses the narrator’s verbal process, and there is another verb in this paragraph expresses the same process, “yelled”, which shows the extreme anger of the narrator. According to the narrator’s description, this man is a tall blond man, that is to say, a white man. These two verbs tell readers the relationship between the white and the black in that special period. Whites believed that they were superior to those blacks, and blacks thought that they should be as equal as whites. When the tall man called the narrator’s insulting name, the narrator got angry. Many verbs which express the mater ial processes can show his anger, such as sprang, pulled, kicked, pushed, butting, etc. He even got out his knife and prepared to slit his throat. He wanted to kill this man. There comes the climax of this accident. But he finally stopped. There is a verb “stared” which expresses the mental process of the narrator and changes the situation. It ends the fight. Staring at the white man, the narrator felt disgusted and ashamed. Then, he began to laugh. “Laugh” is a verb ex