Moment in Peking is a novel originally written in English by Chinese author Lin Yutang。 The novel covers the turbulent events in China from 1900 to 1938, including the Boxer Uprising, the Republican Revolution of 1911 and so on。 The magazine Time said it is very likely to become a classic works which express the reality of modern Chinese society。 In this novel, Lin shaped a lot of female images with distinctive character, like Mulan, Mochow, Mannia and so on。 To some extent, it reflects the status, characters and women’s mien in Chinese society during a certain period of times。

    This paper takes Moment in Peking as the representative to discuss how the metalanguage which is used in the process of narration to portray female characters。 We can get some information from the following example。

 By the time she was fourteen, her mind was fully mature, and she learned ways of putting up with injustices from her elder brother which were so essentially a part of a girl’s education。 “To yield, to yield” must be the girl’s attitude (Lin, 1939, p。 73)。

    Based on the underlined part，we can get that what kind of attitude the girl should have, but why all the girls should do like that, the readers don’t know, they get information from the author’s narration, and they totally believe him。“Must”is a modal verb, which expresses the narrator’s emotion, attitude or mood。 The narrator also added subjective evaluation when he was describing。 It also reflects the author’s authority and his power of control for the narrative discourse。 This is the function of the metalanguage which used to explain and tell the readers that the education girls received determines what kind of rules they should abide by at that times, so the readers can understand the characters more easily。

    From the analysis, we can understand the author’s style of writing, the mode of thinking and cultural values better。 In the process of data collection, it is difficult to find the monograph that combines this two elements—narrative novels and matelanguage, so we hope that after the analysis we can have a more basic understanding of the application of metalanguage in the narrative novels。

    This paper intends to analyze the use of metalingual comments in the process of the female’s portaryal depends on the classification in Feng’s report in 2007。 The first includes two aspects: one is almost implicit metalanguage, and the other is the obvious and even dominate expression of the metalanguage。 The second is to explain, modify and complete the narrator’s discourse during the process of narration by metalanguage means。 Comparing and analyzing different female characters according to these two types of metalingual comment, so that we can summarize and understand the effect of metalanguage on the establishment of female’s characters。 The structure of this paper is also based on this classification。 After explaining the basic concept of metalanguage, we focus on the one of the most important function of metalanguage — metalingual comment, and list examples respectively to analyze the characters in Moment in Peking, and finally get the conclusion。文献综述

2 Literature Review 

2。1 Studies on Metalanguage

2。1。1 The Concept and Function of Metalanguage

    There is a brief introduction about the function of metalanguage by Malmgreen (1986), He pointed out that the speaker occasionally has some discussions on the description and the narration of characters and events in fictional world。 Those discussions are comments。 Malmgreen believes that discourse comment can be pided into three categories: personal comment, ideological comment and metalingual comment。 Personal comment represents narrator’s opinions, beliefs, judgments or the attitude toward characters, events in the fictional world。 Ideological comment intends to preset a value system which services for group of readers and authors。 It can be considered as “implied or ironic comment” raised by Chatman。 The prominent feature of metalingual comment is that narrator use the clear metalingual and linguistic means to express his comment on the behaviour of narration。 Because the metalanguage in the literature study refers to the level of narrative means and the pure metalanguage refers to the linguistic sign in linguistics, these always be ignored。 In addition, Feng (2007）referred to the concept of object language and metalanguage in the analysis of literary works。 Object language is the first-order language and is always used to describe object things in the world, metalanguage is the second-order language, which may be the symbol of professional language for logician and mathematician , linguists use it to describe the natural language(that is tools of professional linguists); for ordinary language, the use of metalanguage treat the natural language and verbal signs as the objects of description and reference。 For the research on Chinese metalanguage。 Wang (2012) explained two kinds of metalanguage in detail in his own report。 He also lists some examples to explain his opinion in the aspect of words, sentence and so on。 Such as some conjunctions like “so”, “because” and some phrases or short sentences。 In this report, the first is the discourse itself, which refers to a commentary on a discourse or theory; the second refers to the meaning which is beyond the meaning of concept, it is the speaker who organizes the text to attract the hearer or uses some means of dominant language to express attitudes, opinions, personal feelings towards propositional content, manifestation and function。 This paper introduces the application and importance of metalanguage in the novel, paving the way for the follow-up study of Chinese language and metalanguage。