On Functional Stylistics Approach Of W. B. Yeats’When You Are Old

Stylistics,as an inter-discipline between linguistics and literary criticism,has been well developed in recent years and become a more and more popular theory to be applied into the analyses of different kinds of texts.Poems,as an important cultural heritage,are among those kinds of texts.Traditionally,poems are appreciated from the perspective of literary criticism.But with the development of modern linguistics,stylistics,as a more objective method than literary criticism,has gained more and more scholars’attention.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,functional stylistics is the most important component of stylistics,which considers language as a meaning potential and analyzes language from social contexts or contexts beyond texts,providing a comprehensive analysis of language.William Butler Yeats（1865¹939）,the author of When You Are Old,is a worldly famous Irish Poet and one of the foremost figures in the literature of 20^th century,who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.As a representative of Yeats’works and Romantic poems,When You Are Old has attracted the attention of many scholars at home and abroad to launch analyses of it from various perspectives,such as expressing techniques,literary criticism and translation study,but few analyses have been conducted from the perspective of linguistics.Therefore,based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,this thesis will probe into the stylistic analysis of Yeats’poem—When You Are Old,aiming to find out the thematic meaning of this poem and the unique writing style of its author,and confirm the applicability and usefulness of functional linguistics in the analysis of poems.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one gives a brief introduction to both the background and the significance of this research.Besides,the thesis methodology and structure are also included in this part.Chapter two provides an overview of previous studies at home and abroad on style,stylistics and functional stylistics.In chapter three,this thesis mainly focuses on the theory of three metafunctions of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar,which is the theoretical framework of this research.Chapter four is concerned with the case study.In this chapter,under the guidance of three metafunctions theory,the stylistic features of Yeats’poem When You Are Old are analyzed in detail,aiming at helping readers to understand the thematic meaning and writing style of this poem from a new angle.The last chapter is the conclusion part,which not only summarizes the major findings of this research but also reflects on its limitations.Through the qualitative and descriptive analyses,the tentative findings of this study can be summed up as follows:（1）the ideational function is realized by transitivity through the choices of six process,among which mental process and material process are adopted more to show that the main genre of this poem is narrative and descriptive;（2）the interpersonal function is realized by mood and modality,and there is no mood adjunct or modal verbal operator in this poem,which reflects the poet’s eternal love towards his untouchable lover without any hesitation and doubt;（3）the textual function is realized by thematic structure and cohesion,and various cohesive devices such reference and conjunction are also applied to achieve cohesion of this poem in grammatical,lexical and phonological level;（4）Functional Linguistics is a feasible and operational theory for analyzing poem from a new perspective,which will facilitate readers to better understand the thematic meaning of this poem and appreciate the unique writing style of Yeats from a new angle.