富兰克林自传选段分析

An analysis of discourse

13届英师1班潘瑶 20132988

The part was selected from The Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin. It’s about one of his son who died out of the smallpox in 1736.According to the selected paragraph, we can appreciate the beauty of Franklin’s works.

It’s easy to find that the key word in the selection is “regret” which is repeated for several times. At the same time, some adjectives and adverbs are used to describe it, for example, “long”, “bitterly”, “still” and “never”, which show how deep regretful the author was. There’re also some pronouns, such as “I” and “my”, make the content more objective and some exact numbers which make the work more correct, such as “1736” and “4”. Besides that, the stative verbs contained in the paragraph, “regret” and “forgive”, tell the readers that the influence of his son’s death would last forever. And the part has many capital s which is significantly special and these capitals make readers pay attention to the important words. All of the key word, stative verbs and capitals decide the part’s tone which is unhappy.

In addition to the words of this part, the sentences are very superior. Firstly, Franklin used several compound sentences to express the unhappy and grieved emotion. Together with somesimple sentences, the paragraph has a lot of ups and downs. And in the passive sentence, the last sentence, we can feel that the author emphasized “the safer” and tried to avoid mentioning the sad incident.

In the paragraph, the usage of two kinds of rhetoric devices in the discourse modifies the content. The first one is repetition of the word “regret” and the

second one is hyperbole with the word “never”. These devices st ress the unhappiness and regret of Franklin.

This discourse is one section of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin who is the prototype of the American Dream. In the book, not only can we enjoy and appreciate the beauty of his book but also we can learn the virtues from Franklin.