MOOD AND MODALITY PATTERNS OF TWO EXCERPTS FROM WILLIAM GOLDING’S LORD OF THE FLIES

Abstract

This article scrutinizes mood and modality in selected excerpts from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The theory that underpins this scholarship is that of the interpersonal metafunction of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL), an approach proposed by Halliday (1985/1994) and propounded by some of his followers like Eggins (1994/2004) and Matthiessen (2014) for the study of language and its function(s). The study uses the mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology. It has interestingly made important findings. Among many others presented in the subsection entitled findings and interpretation, the scholarship has revealed that both studied texts share a common focus on the giving of information about leadership problems, dictatorship, savagery, civilization, human nature dark side or inherent evil, loss of innocence, and the future of mankind. Modalization in the selected excerpts has been used to describe the desperate successive situations the personae of the excerpts went through, their planning for a better future, as well as the possibilities they had to get out of the ordeal. Furthermore, modulation has been used to reveal both the characters’ strong inclination to finding the ways out to their precariousness, and the necessity for them to take salutary actions that will make their dreams of being rescued real. The study has interestingly paved the way to such further investigations related areas of the systemic functional linguistics as experiential and textual meanings, discourse-semantics analyses of reference, lexical and conjunctive relations to name but a few. Keywords: modality, modalization, modulation, mood, SFL.