2.1.1. Personality theory.

Personality psychology provides the structural basis for analysing individual differences in both real and fictional contexts. The Big Five Model (BFM) identifies five core personality dimensions, namely openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, that describe consistent psychological patterns across individuals [8]. Each dimension captures a different aspect of emotional and behavioural regulation: openness reflects curiosity and imagination; conscientiousness, self-control and organisation; extraversion, social engagement; agreeableness, empathy and cooperation; and neuroticism, emotional instability [15]. To illustrate how linguistic features correspond to these psychological tendencies, Table 1 summarizes the five dimensions of the BFM alongside their typical linguistic manifestations.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 1. Dimensions of the Big Five Model (BFM) of Personality The table illustrates how linguistic features may reflect corresponding psychological tendencies within the BFM framework. “Evaluative lexis” refers to lexical items encoding value judgements along attitudinal axes, corresponding to the Attitude system in Appraisal Theory [25]. “Affective intensity” refers to the scalar amplification or mitigation of emotional meaning, corresponding to the Graduation system within the same framework [25]. These two categories are analytically distinct, though they may co-occur in the same clause. Linguistic indicator sets are representative rather than exhaustive.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0354255.t001

The correspondence between BFM dimensions and their linguistic realizations has been empirically established across a range of text-based personality studies. Research on self-narrative language has demonstrated that Conscientiousness is reliably indexed by obligation modals, precise action verbs, and structured syntactic patterns reflecting goal orientation and self-discipline [20]. Openness and Extraversion, by contrast, are associated with perceptual adjectives, first-person pronouns, and markers of high affective intensity, reflecting the imaginative engagement and social expressiveness characteristic of these dimensions [21]. These empirically grounded correspondences inform the linguistic indicators summarized in Table 1 and provide the evidential basis for the BFM–SFL mapping developed in the analytical framework.

The Big Five Model is adopted in the present study for several reasons. First, it has accumulated the most extensive empirical validation in personality psychology and remains the dominant framework in both cross-cultural and text-based personality research [14,15]. Second, its five dimensions, particularly Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness, map directly onto the patterns of emotional regulation, moral tension, and psychological transformation that characterize Yun Ling’s narrative voice in The Garden of Evening Mists. Third, the BFM has been productively applied in text-based personality analysis, including the systematic examination of fictional characters across different literary periods, providing an established basis for linking linguistic features to psychological dimensions. [3,14]. While more recent models offer additional dimensions that may prove valuable in future cross-cultural literary research, the present study prioritizes the BFM’s analytical clarity and its proven applicability to language-based personality inference within a single-text qualitative framework.

Building on this descriptive model, McAdams proposed a three-tier personality theory that introduces a developmental and narrative dimension [7]. Personality operates at three levels: dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life narratives. The first two represent stable tendencies and contextual motivations, while the third, narrative identity, captures the individual’s self-story constructed through memory and meaning-making. This framework is particularly valuable for literary analysis, where language, reflection, and memory serve as the primary means through which psychological evolution becomes visible.

Recent research has extended the BFM toward cross-linguistic and text-based domains. Soto and John revised the Big Five Inventory (BFI-2) to account for cultural and linguistic variability [15]. Park and his colleagues demonstrated that natural language use can predict personality profiles, confirming that linguistic cues reliably signal personality dimensions [14]. More recently, scholars have extended BFM-based analysis to literary texts across historical periods, demonstrating that fictional narratives encode implicit models of personality that reflect broader cultural understandings of individual differences [2,3].

Together, these frameworks suggest that personality is both structured and narratively dynamic. The integration of psychological and linguistic theory enables personality traits to be operationalized as discernible linguistic patterns, providing a bridge between qualitative character interpretation and systematic discourse analysis. This theoretical link underpins the analytical framework presented in later sections and is visualized in Fig 1, which outlines the conceptual framework of this study.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 1. Construction of the Theoretical Framework Three disciplinary sources: the Big Five Model of Personality (BFM) [8,15], Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) [5] and psycholinguistic theory [7,14] converge into an integrated BFM–SFL mapping framework connecting each personality dimension to its primary metafunctional site of linguistic realization.

This framework is applied to the qualitative discourse analysis of The Garden of Evening Mists across three narrative phases, with emotional polarity (negative, neutral, positive) as the primary analytical lens.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0354255.g001

2.1.2. Systemic Functional Linguistics and Emotional Representation.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) provides the linguistic framework through which emotion and personality are observed in textual form. It conceptualizes language as a meaning-making system organized through three metafunctions, namely ideational, interpersonal, and textual which respectively represent experience, attitude, and discourse organization [5,22]. SFL conceptualizes language as a meaning-making system organized through three metafunctions that operate simultaneously in every clause, providing a comprehensive analytical resource for the study of language in social and psychological contexts [5,23]. Recent scholarship has confirmed the wide applicability and flexibility of SFL as an analytical tool across genres and languages, with particular attention to the interpersonal metafunction as a site of evaluative and affective meaning [24].

SFL’s focus on the interpersonal metafunction is particularly relevant to emotional expression. Mood, modality, and appraisal reveal how speakers or narrators encode evaluation and stance, forming systematic patterns that reflect emotional polarity and psychological disposition [6,25]. In The Garden of Evening Mists, these linguistic resources, including modal verbs, affective adjectives, and cohesive conjunctions, trace the protagonist’s psychological transition from repression to reconciliation.

By linking SFL’s metafunctional categories to the BFM’s personality dimensions, this study constructs an interdisciplinary mapping that connects psychological structure with linguistic realization. Fig 2 visualizes how each of the five personality traits corresponds to specific metafunctional components, establishing a linguistic foundation for SFL-based close reading in subsequent analysis.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 2. Analytical flow of the study Narrative passages from The Garden of Evening Mists are organized across three phases corresponding to the protagonist’s psychological trajectory.

Each passage is annotated for SFL features at the ideational, interpersonal, and textual levels through manual analysis conducted across successive close readings. Emotional polarity (negative, neutral, positive) is determined on the basis of dominant lexicon grammatical patterns. Polarity orientations are then mapped onto Big Five personality dimensions to trace the protagonist’s personality trajectory across the narrative arc.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0354255.g002

SFL thus serves as both a descriptive and operational framework, bridging linguistic form and psychological meaning. Through its integration with personality theory, it enables the present research to examine how emotion and personality are encoded in language, a necessary foundation for the qualitative discourse analysis that follows.

3.3.1. Interpersonal function: Modality and appraisal.

The interpersonal metafunction provides the clearest linguistic window into Yun Ling’s emotional stance across the novel, revealing how modality and appraisal resources encode psychological disposition at the level of grammar rather than explicit declaration. Recent scholarship has extended the application of Appraisal theory to literary writing contexts, demonstrating that skilled interpreters of literary texts deploy Appreciation, Engagement, and Graduation resources to realize nuanced evaluative stances [16]. In the trauma recollection phase, the interpersonal register is characterized by declarative clauses that foreclose possibility rather than open it. The novel’s opening establishes this pattern immediately: “What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me? None” (p. 13). The rhetorical question followed by the monosyllabic negative answer enacts through syntax the very closure it describes. There is no modal hedging here, no epistemic uncertainty: only the flat assertion of impossibility. The absence of obligation modals is itself significant: Yun Ling does not say she cannot be healed; she says there are no words that could heal her. This shift from deontic to conditional modality positions the impossibility as inherent in the world rather than self-imposed, yet the effect is the same, an emotional foreclosure that aligns with high Conscientiousness and high Neuroticism, traits associated with moral rigidity and the suppression of affect [13].

Appraisal resources in these passages operate through negative affect inscribed in first-person constructions. When Yun Ling acknowledges that “the smell... I thought I had forgotten the smell. But one never does” (p. 83), the generalization encoded in the impersonal pronoun one universalizes her individual trauma into a categorical truth, simultaneously distancing the self from the experience and asserting its permanence. The modal never closes off any possibility of escape, and the shift from first-person to impersonal subject performs a dissociative movement characteristic of trauma discourse: the self becomes a case of a general rule rather than a feeling individual. The relationship between trauma and language is not merely one of content but of form: trauma shapes the very capacity and inclination to speak, generating patterns of withholding, fragmentation, and silence that are as linguistically meaningful as overt affective expression [27].

As the narrative moves into the Yugiri apprenticeship phase, the interpersonal register shifts toward evaluative language centered on aesthetic judgment and proportion. Aritomo’s instruction: “We are composing a picture within this frame... they have a sense of uncertainty, of tension and possibility.” (p. 94), introduces a collaborative first-person plural that draws Yun Ling into a shared aesthetic enterprise. The inclusive we replace the isolated I of the trauma passages, and the evaluative nouns uncertainty, tension, and possibility reframe psychological instability as aesthetic virtue. Crucially, possibility appears here for the first time as a positive value, directly inverting the foreclosed possibilities of the trauma phase. This shift in appraisal, from negative affect directed inward to positive appreciation directed outward, signals the emergence of Openness alongside the stabilization of Conscientiousness.

In the reflective closure phase, positive polarity is realized through declarative constructions that carry the weight of hard-won acceptance. The statement “Nature is the best teacher” (p. 305), reported as Aritomo’s words to Yun Ling, is syntactically unguarded: no modal qualification, no negation, no hedging of any kind. The relational process asserts identity with finality. More significantly, Yun Ling does not resist or qualify this statement in her narration: she allows it to stand as wisdom. This receptivity itself marks a shift in her interpersonal stance, from a voice that questions and forecloses to one that receives and integrates. The culminating declaration: “I know now that whether it was an accident or if he did it on purpose, there was nothing I could have said or done to have prevented it” (p. 325), completes this arc. The epistemic modal know replaces the earlier interrogatives and negations, and the conditional clause that follows it acknowledges contingency without being destabilized by it. This is the interpersonal grammar of acceptance: not the absence of doubt, but its containment within a larger declarative frame.

3.3.2. Ideational function: Process types and experiential meaning.

At the ideational level, emotional polarity is realized through contrasting process types that trace Yun Ling’s shifting relation to memory, agency, and embodied experience. The progression from mental and behavioral processes in the trauma phase to material and relational processes in the closure phase enacts the novel’s central psychological movement at the level of grammar itself.

In the trauma recollection phase, mental processes dominate the narrative voice. The act of memory is rendered as a form of involuntary perception: Yun Ling does not choose to remember but finds herself remembering, and the linguistic form of this experience reflects its compulsory quality. When she describes emerging from the internment camp: “I was frail when I emerged from the slave-labor camp, and my health has never recovered completely.” (p. 34), the stative verb was, and the present perfect has never recovered together suspend the past in the present, making the damage continuous and ongoing rather than completed. The experiential meaning here is that trauma does not end; it persists as a condition of the self. The mental process of recollection is not chosen but imposed, as when the sight of origami flowers causes an involuntary memory of the camp: “I pushed the memory away” (p. 42). The behavioral process pushed away is striking precisely because it applies a physical action to a mental experience: memory is treated as a material object that can be displaced, yet the effort required to do so reveals how resistant it is to displacement.

Behavioral processes appear alongside mental ones in the early chapters to create a portrait of a self that monitors its own responses. Yun Ling does not simply feel: she watches herself feeling, intervening in her own emotional process as a form of conscientious self-regulation. This reflexive quality, in which the experiencing self and the observed self converge, is characteristic of the high-Conscientiousness, high-Neuroticism personality constellation: emotion is not expressed but managed, and the management is itself a form of expression [28]. The transition to material processes in the apprenticeship phase marks a decisive shift in the protagonist’s experiential orientation. Physical labor becomes the medium through which psychological reappraisal is affected: Yun Ling digs, rakes, plants, and lifts stones under Aritomo’s instruction, and these material processes externalize the internal work of recovery. The soil is not merely soil: it is the material through which grief is metabolized into action. When Aritomo tells her, “The girl who had once walked in the gardens of Kyoto with her sister... she is still there. Deep inside, she is still there” (p. 86), the spatial metaphor deep inside positions selfhood as something buried rather than destroyed, recoverable through the process of excavation. The garden, as both a literal site and a psychological metaphor, becomes the space in which material and mental processes converge. The capacity to construct new meaning from repeated engagement with difficult experiences, transforming the act of recollection into the act of re-making, is central to narrative identity development [29].

In the reflective closure phase, relational processes emerge with increasing frequency, encoding a self that defines itself through connection rather than isolation. The novel’s final movement centers on an act of deliberate release: “I let it go, and I feel I am releasing a bird from my grasp” (p. 326). The material process let go is accompanied by a mental process of perception (I feel) that grounds the physical act in subjective experience, binding action and awareness in a single clause. The metaphor of the bird transforms an act of relinquishment into one of liberation: not loss but release, not emptiness but openness. This is the ideational grammar of reconciliation: the self that once pushed memory away now lets it go, and the difference between these two processes, one defensive and one voluntary, encodes the full arc of Yun Ling’s psychological transformation.

3.3.3. Textual function: Thematic structure and cohesion.

At the textual level, emotional polarity is expressed through shifts in cohesive organization and thematic progression that mirror the protagonist’s psychological state. The formal properties of Tan’s novel, its syntactic rhythms, its patterns of repetition and variation, its management of silence and speech, encode emotional meaning at the level of discourse organization. In passages of negative polarity, the dominant textual pattern is negative cohesion: the text coheres around what is missing rather than what is present, and the resulting voice defines itself by what it has lost. The early courtroom sequence, in which Yun Ling listens to her own life being recounted at her retirement, offers a paradigmatic instance:

“I had never spoken of the three years I had spent in the camp to anyone. I tried not to think about it as I went about my days, and mostly I succeeded. But occasionally the memories still found their way in, through a sound I heard, a word someone uttered, or a smell I caught in the street.” (p. 17)

Three textual mechanisms work together here. First, the cohesive chain is built almost entirely from negative and limiting elements: never, not, mostly (a hedged success), but occasionally (a concessive reversal). The lexical chain that holds the passage together is one of foreclosure and qualified failure rather than affirmation. Second, the referent of the trauma is never named directly: it appears only as anaphoric it (“not to think about it”, “memories still found their way in”). The text’s textual reference grammar enacts what its propositional content describes: the experience is grammatically present but lexically withheld, holding its place in the discourse without entering it. Third, the thematic progression is deflected rather than developmental: each clause introduces an attempt at containment (I had never spoken... I tried not to think... mostly I succeeded) and the final clause undoes the containment without resolving it (But occasionally the memories still found their way in). The textual arc is not a movement from problem to resolution but a recursive holding pattern: the same effort repeated, the same partial failure repeated. This is the textual grammar of trauma: cohesion through what is refused, themed through what cannot be progressed past.

The same negative cohesive logic operates across the trauma passages of Phase I more broadly. The semantic fields of silence, forgetting, and incompleteness recur in clustered repetition: never, no, none, not, pushed away, producing a discourse that is held together by absence rather than presence. Sentence fragments and paratactic structures reinforce the same effect at the level of clause organization, refusing the syntactic subordination that would integrate experience into a continuous narrative. What emerges, textually, is a voice that has not yet learned to organize its own past.

The apprenticeship phase introduces a markedly different textual organization. Aritomo’s speech is characterized by complex clause structures that embed one thought within another, modeling a form of cognitive integration that Yun Ling gradually internalizes. His instruction: “We are composing a picture within this frame... they have large tracts of emptiness, their composition is asymmetrical... they have a sense of uncertainty, of tension and possibility.” (p. 94), moves through assertion, elaboration, and reframing in a single extended utterance. The ellipsis marks pause that are contemplative rather than evasive, and the final evaluative nouns, uncertainty, tension, possibility, introduce positive value into what might otherwise be experienced as deficiency. Yun Ling’s own narration begins to adopt these structural habits: longer sentences, more frequent subordination, a thematic progression that moves toward rather than away from meaning.

The reflective closure phase is marked by the most complex and integrated textual organization in the novel. The penultimate scene, in which Yun Ling releases a lantern over the pond, moves through a series of precisely coordinated clauses: “I light the candle in the lantern and hold it in my hands. I close my eyes and see Aritomo. A woman’s face appears beneath my eyelids, and I realize it is Yun Hong. She does not smile. She is not angry; she is not sad. She is only a memory” (p. 325). The clauses are short but syntactically complete, each one resolved before the next begins, a thematic progression that is forward-moving and purposeful rather than circular and obsessive. The negations here, does not smile, is not angry, is not sad, no longer foreclose but classify, and the final clause she is only a memory achieves through the word only what the entire novel has been working toward: the containment of grief within a liveable category. Memory, finally, is only memory, still present, but no longer overwhelming.

The culminating declaration: “My decision to restore the garden is the correct one, the only one I can make.” (p. 326), closes the novel’s textual arc with a declarative sentence of complete syntactic and thematic integration. The modal can replace the earlier cannot and never; the evaluative adjective correct replaces the earlier interrogatives and negations; and the phrase the only one I can make transforms necessity from constraint into acceptance. This is the textual grammar of reconciliation: not the absence of limitation, but its transformation into choice.

3.4.1. Personality dimensions reflected in emotional polarity.

Yun Ling’s linguistic behavior throughout The Garden of Evening Mists can be read as tracing a gradual transformation from emotional suppression to reconciliation. In the trauma-recollection phase, negative polarity dominates. The language abounds with modal expressions of restraint, can’t, will not, never, as in her refusal to reenter a hospital:

“I’ll never put myself inside another one again. Never.” (p. 121)

and in her self-defensive response to companionship:

“You can’t live alone,” Frederik says. … “It’s too late for me to change my ways.” (p. 121)

Such constructions convey self-imposed duty and moral tension, aligning with a high-conscientiousness/high-neuroticism personality constellation often linked to survivor guilt [12,13]. The repetition and negation pattern rhythmically enact Yun Ling’s internal struggle to maintain order amid trauma.

During the Yugiri apprenticeship phase, emotional neutrality emerges. The language shifts toward evaluative lexis reflecting aesthetic judgment and proportion. Aritomo’s lesson,

“We are composing a picture within this frame. … Look at our paintings — they have large tracts of emptiness, their composition is asymmetrical … they have a sense of uncertainty, of tension and possibility.” (p. 95–96)

foregrounds balance and restraint, linguistic realizations of deliberation and cognitive control. Yun Ling’s reflective narration and descriptive precision (the soil felt cool and moist on my skin, p. 96) signal stabilized conscientiousness and growing openness. The apprenticeship’s aesthetic discipline thus becomes a metaphorical and linguistic medium for psychological reappraisal, echoing McAdams’s theory of coherence through narrative reconstruction [30].

In the reflective closure phase, positive polarity predominates as the narrative language turns outward through material and relational processes. The verbs dig, plant, restore, and touch reveal embodied reconciliation:

“I light three more joss sticks and plant them into the moist patch of soil in front of it, then watch the smoke rise into the trees.” (p. 321)

“It will be restored to the way it used to be, the way I remember it.” (p. 324)

Modal verbs of permission (may, let, will) replace negation, articulating release and acceptance. This linguistic and psychological convergence corresponds to high openness and reduced neuroticism, consistent with findings that emotional flexibility and coherence predict well-being in narrative identity. In this closing phase, Yun Ling’s language no longer guards against memory; it transforms it into understanding, completing the novel’s emotional arc of moral restraint toward inner peace.

3.4.2. Personality trajectory across narrative phases.

The three narrative phases of The Garden of Evening Mists do not simply mark temporal divisions in the plot; they encode distinct configurations of personality expression, each characterized by a different balance of Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. The trajectories of these dimensions across the narrative are traced here through close reading of the linguistic markers that index each trait within the SFL-based analytical framework. Conscientiousness is realized through obligation modals and negation structures encoding moral restraint (must, cannot, will not, never, had to); Neuroticism through the semantic field of emotional vulnerability and trauma (pain, fear, dread, guilt, grief, afraid); and Openness through markers of perceptual sensitivity, aesthetic appreciation, and psychological acceptance (beautiful, wonder, peace, release, accept, restore, nature). These linguistic categories are interpretive rather than enumerative: their function is to direct close reading toward the formal sites where personality is grammatically realized, not to support quantitative claims.

Of the three dimensions, Conscientiousness is the most stable and consistently prominent throughout the narrative. Its sustained, gradually intensifying presence across all three phases suggests that disciplined self-regulation reads less as a reactive response to trauma than as a foundational feature of how the narrative constructs Yun Ling’s psychological identity, present from the opening pages and persisting through to the novel’s close. What shifts is not the presence of this trait but its affective valence. In Phase I, the obligation modals and negation structures that index Conscientiousness encode suppression and self-imposed restraint: cannot, will not, never are the grammatical instruments of a self that has armoured itself against feeling. By Phase III, the same disciplined register has been transformed. The declaration “My decision to restore the garden is the correct one, the only one I can make” (p. 327) retains the conscientious insistence on moral clarity, but the modal can has replaced cannot, and necessity has been reframed as agency. Conscientiousness, in the novel’s closing movement, is no longer a form of self-protection but of self-determination.

Neuroticism traces the most nuanced arc of the three dimensions: a discernible recession through the Yugiri apprenticeship phase, followed by a partial return in the closing movement. Its decline through the apprenticeship phase reflects the disciplining of emotional vulnerability through aesthetic practice: as Yun Ling’s language shifts toward the evaluative lexis of proportion and harmony, the affective markers of fear and pain recede into the background of the prose. The minor recovery in Phase III is equally revealing and should not be misread as regression. It registers the emotional weight of genuine reconciliation: releasing the lantern, accepting Aritomo’s disappearance, confronting what cannot be recovered or explained. “The smell... I thought I had forgotten the smell. But one never does.” (p. 83): grief in the closing phase is not eliminated but integrated, its linguistic presence reduced yet legible, transformed from wound into witness. The slight uptick in Neuroticism markers is the formal trace of this integration, a psychologically honest acknowledgement that reconciliation carries its own affective cost.

Openness displays the most dramatic trajectory of the three dimensions, and its pattern is the most interpretively complex. Its sustained presence across Phases I and II, remaining textually conspicuous even within the constrained emotional register of the trauma phase, suggests that perceptual and aesthetic sensitivity is not a capacity that Yun Ling develops through the apprenticeship but one she already possesses and has never fully relinquished. She attends to light, silence, and the textures of the natural world even when she cannot receive them without pain; she notices beauty even as she refuses to be consoled by it. What the sharp rise in Phase III registers, then, is not the emergence of Openness but its liberation: the removal of the psychological constraints that had previously limited its expression. This trajectory is realized across multiple sites in Phase III: the deliberate movement to Yugiri’s restoration, the dialogues with Tatsuji, and the closing reflections on Aritomo. Its most concentrated textual culmination, however, is the lantern-release passage: “I let it go, and I feel I am releasing a bird from my grasp.” (p. 326). Here three grammatical movements coincide: the material process let go releases physical and psychological hold; the mental process I feel registers the subject’s awareness of that release as openness rather than loss; and the metonymic substitution of the lantern for Yun Hong’s memory enacts the long-deferred conscientious commitment to her sister. The clause is the moment at which all three personality dimensions, Openness, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, are seen to be in motion together, no longer in tension.

3.4.3. Interpersonal trajectory: Agreeableness and extraversion in Yun Ling’s Voice.

While the Conscientiousness–Neuroticism–Openness configuration captures the most densely realized personality dimensions in the novel, the BFM framework, as instantiated in Table 1, also encompasses Agreeableness and Extraversion. Both dimensions are present in Yun Ling’s discourse, though with markedly different densities and through different grammatical sites. Agreeableness traces the most consequential interpersonal arc in the novel, since the narrative’s central thematic question, whether and how to release inherited hatred, is enacted at the interpersonal level of language. Extraversion, by contrast, is realized at lower density and in a constrained register characteristic of introspective first-person narrative; nevertheless, its trajectory across the three phases is legible and reinforces the interpretive arc established by the other dimensions.

In Phase I, Yun Ling’s language is saturated with the markers of low Agreeableness: refusal, withdrawal, and the grammatical foreclosure of cooperative engagement. The lexical field of refused, hatred, cold, and anger, which together account for over fifty tokens across the novel and concentrate disproportionately in the early chapters, encodes not merely emotional state but a consistent orientation toward others as objects of judgement rather than subjects of trust. The interpersonal grammar that realizes this stance is twofold. First, Yun Ling deploys imperative and high-deontic declarative mood toward Japanese interlocutors with no mitigation: “I will make sure all copies of your book are pulped” (p.31) and “I will decide what the Japanese people have a right to” (p.32) combine the deontic will with first-person agency to enact what Brown and Levinson [19] term a maximal face-threatening act, performed without any of the redress that would index Agreeableness. Second, when others extend the cooperative move that would invite reciprocal Agreeableness, most notably Magnus’s appeal “This hatred in you, you can’t let it affect your life” (p. 51), Yun Ling’s response refuses uptake: “It is not up to me, Magnus” (p. 51). The grammatical pattern here is diagnostic: an existential construction that displaces agency outside the self, denying the very capacity for the cooperative repositioning Magnus proposes. Magnus’s subsequent extended self-disclosure of his own war-bereaved family, culminating in the more emphatic appeal, “Let it go, this hatred in you. Let it go” (p. 52), is met with no recorded reply at all. This silence completes the refusal of uptake at a deeper structural level than the earlier verbal demurral.

What renders the Agreeableness trajectory analytically rich is that the novel structurally positions Magnus as the persistent interlocutor through whom the disagreeable stance is interrogated. Magnus’s own self-disclosure: “I held on to my hatred for forty-six years” (p. 52), follows the model of overcoming resentment that Yun Ling resists for the bulk of the narrative. The interpersonal grammar of these exchanges, with their pattern of cooperative offer and refused uptake, makes Magnus the textual instrument by which Yun Ling’s low Agreeableness is rendered legible as a sustained psychological position rather than a mere lexical mood.

Phase II tracks a tentative repositioning enacted through cooperative material processes rather than through positive evaluative lexis. The apprenticeship at Yugiri proceeds through joint action verbs, working alongside Aritomo in the garden, transplanting, raking, observing, that constitute Agreeableness in its most literal SFL realization: cooperative material processes in which two participants share agency over a single goal. The novel makes few explicit declarations of warmth or trust during this phase (the lexis of trust, compassion, tenderness remains conspicuously sparse throughout), but this absence is itself diagnostic. Yun Ling’s Agreeableness in Phase II is realized not through the conventional appraisal lexis of warmth but through the experiential grammar of co-participation. This is the novel’s distinctive instantiation of the dimension: cooperation without sentiment, alliance without disclosure.

Phase III brings the Agreeableness arc to its most fully realized expression through the Yun Ling–Professor Yoshikawa Tatsuji relationship. The interpersonal trajectory here is exact: from the Phase III opening, where Yun Ling addresses Tatsuji with the same hostile deontic declaratives she directed at Japanese interlocutor’s decades earlier, through a sustained sequence of two weeks of conversation, to the closing exchange in which Tatsuji offers her the woodblock print and Yun Ling extends her hands to receive it: “Extending my hands, I receive the book from him. I feel we have known each other for longer than the two weeks he has spent here. We are the same.” (p.324). The grammatical movement is from imperative-mood threat through declarative-mood acknowledgement to the closing relational process clause We are the same, a high-Agreeableness identification with the interlocutor whom the entire narrative had previously constructed as an inadmissible other. That this identification is performed with a Japanese historian, in the closing pages, with a man whose presence at the war’s perimeter has just been disclosed, makes the Agreeableness arc inseparable from the novel’s central thematic resolution. Agreeableness is not an incidental dimension here; it is the linguistic site at which the narrative’s core ethical question is settled.

Extraversion presents a different analytical situation. The lexicogrammatical resources conventionally associated with high Extraversion, such as exclamative mood, rapid turn-taking, and assertive declaratives encoding social dominance, are sparse in Yun Ling’s discourse, as is consistent with first-person introspective narration shaped by trauma. This sparseness is not, however, equivalent to absence; rather, Extraversion in this text is realized through a constrained register whose trajectory across the three phases parallels the Agreeableness arc, though at lower density. In Phase I, Yun Ling’s interpersonal engagement is characterized by minimal-turn dialogue, abrupt declaratives, and a pattern of conversation closure rather than elaboration. In Phase II, the apprenticeship structure produces a different interpersonal pattern: declarative–interrogative alternation between Yun Ling and Aritomo, accompanied by extended joint silence as a marked communicative resource rather than a default state. In Phase III, the dialogues with Frederik in the present-time frame and with Tatsuji across his two-week stay are sustained, elaborated, and characterized by the cooperative turn-taking that signals the recovery of social engagement. The frequency with which Frederik appears in the opening and closing chapters, and the tonal ease of those exchanges relative to Phase I, register an Extraversion trajectory whose direction reinforces the broader interpretive claim: not the development of a previously absent capacity, but the gradual lifting of the constraints that had suppressed its expression.

That Agreeableness emerges as the most fully realized of the interpersonal dimensions, while Extraversion remains constrained, is not a defect of the text-personality fit but a structural feature of how introspective first-person narrative instantiates the BFM. The narrative form privileges the grammatical sites at which inner life negotiates its relation to others (modality, appraisal, politeness) over those at which sociality is performed in real time (mood alternation, exclamative force, conversational expansiveness). What the BFM framework registers, when applied to a text of this kind, is not all five dimensions equally but those which the genre most fully activates, a finding that supports rather than undermines the SFL-based mapping, since each dimension’s density of grammatical realization is itself diagnostic of the text’s interpersonal architecture.

3.4.4. Interpretive implications.

The interaction between emotion and personality in The Garden of Evening Mists suggests that linguistic restraint operates not as emotional absence but as a strategy of psychological regulation. Yun Ling’s deliberate syntax and precise use of modal verbs enact a disciplined control over affect, turning language into a stabilizing mechanism when emotional coherence is at risk. Her gradual shift from modal necessity to modal possibility, and from fragmented parataxis to cohesive coordination, marks a subtle reconstruction of meaning. This linguistic evolution can be read as paralleling a psychodynamic process, moving from trauma containment toward emotional reintegration, consistent with empirical findings that lexical diversity and modal flexibility accompany recovery and cognitive openness [13,28].

The novel also exemplifies McAdams’s theory of narrative identity, which posits that selfhood is shaped through the act of narrating experience. Yun Ling’s linguistic self-discipline gradually transforms into reflective composure; her controlled expression becomes a medium of understanding rather than suppression. Through language, her personality development is not merely represented but realized: each grammatical choice contributes to the reconstruction of self and meaning. Empirical research confirms that narrative identity themes of agency and integration contribute independently to psychological well-being, over and above the effects of dispositional personality traits [31]. The novel’s closing movement enacts what McAdams describes as the shift from redemptive to acceptance narratives [32]. This movement toward acceptance is not a passive resignation but an active narrative achievement: a reorientation of selfhood that acknowledges irreversible loss without being defined by it [33]. Rather than transforming suffering into triumph, Yun Ling’s language moves toward a quieter accommodation of what cannot be changed, integrating loss into a liveable account of selfhood. The SFL-based analysis presented in this study demonstrates that close reading, when grounded in a systematic linguistic framework, can illuminate the discernible dimensions of psychological change without reducing its interpretive complexity. By attending to modality, process type, and cohesive organization as the formal realization of personality and emotion, the study shows how linguistic evidence and psychological theory converge in the analysis of literary narrative.

3.4.5. Summary of findings.

The integration of emotional polarity analysis, SFL-based linguistic interpretation, and personality mapping reveals a coherent trajectory of psychological transformation in The Garden of Evening Mists. Yun Ling’s emotional evolution unfolds not through isolated episodes of feeling but through systematic shifts in linguistic form: patterns of restraint, reflection, and reconciliation that index her changing psychological states across the three narrative phases.

In the trauma recollection phase, the predominance of obligation modals, syntactic compression, and affective lexis of withdrawal embodies the protagonist’s conscientious effort to contain grief and sustain moral control. Language here does not express emotion so much as manage it: the recurring negations and paratactic fragments that characterize this phase enact through grammatical form the psychological work of suppression. Yun Ling’s voice in these passages is shaped by what it refuses to say, the rhetorical questions met with monosyllabic negation, the obligation modals turned inward, the affective lexis of withdrawal that defines the trauma register established in the novel’s opening pages.

As the narrative progresses into the Yugiri apprenticeship phase, relational verbs and evaluative lexis of proportion and harmony emerge more frequently, signalling a transition toward aesthetic discipline and cognitive reappraisal. The garden becomes both the literal site and the linguistic medium of this reappraisal: Yun Ling’s growing command of the vocabulary of garden-making, composition, balance, tension, possibility, mirrors her growing capacity to hold psychological complexity without being destabilized by it. Conscientiousness remains high, but Neuroticism begins its decline as the structured practice of aesthetic creation provides a channel for emotions that direct expression cannot contain.

In the reflective closure phase, material and relational processes, permissive modality, and cohesive hypotactic structures mark the culmination of this trajectory. The gradual reduction of affective density corresponds with enhanced emotional regulation and diminishing neurotic intensity, while the sharp rise in Openness markers signals the liberation of a perceptual sensitivity that had always been present but had previously been constrained by grief. Personality transformation in this novel is therefore not merely described through narrative events but enacted linguistically: through evolving modalities, process types, and patterns of cohesion that embody psychological integration at the level of grammar itself.

These findings indicate that emotional language in The Garden of Evening Mists functions simultaneously as expression and mechanism: it conveys the protagonist’s inner state while also mediating her adaptation to it. Through language, Yun Ling negotiates the boundaries between silence and disclosure, guilt and forgiveness, restraint and release. More broadly, the study demonstrates that SFL-based qualitative analysis, when integrated with a personality framework, can illuminate the psychological architecture of literary narrative, showing how emotion, cognition, and identity coalesce within the patterned texture of literary form.