An Analysis Of Nuosong's Life Experience In Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English Version Border Town—From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar centers around three metafunctions: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Transitivity system is a semantic system of ideational function.Being an important tool of discourse analysis,it has been widely applied in various types of discourse analysis,such as literature,news,advertising and so on.Since Biancheng was published in 1934,it has been liked and studied by many scholars abroad and at home,and known as “a peak work of pastoral legends in Chinese modern literature”.Biancheng has 4 English versions.Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town is famous for its rigor,precision and fluency,and it is the most faithful to the original work.Hence this thesis chooses this version as the object of study.Many scholars studied Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town from the perspective of translation;a few scholars studied Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town from the perspective of linguistics.Lots of scholars focused on the heroine Cuicui in Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town,but a few scholars studied the hero Nuosong's life experience in Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town.Accordingly,this thesis studied the hero Nuosong's life experience in Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town from the perspective of linguistics.This thesis analyzes Nuosong's life experience in Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town applying transitivity system.His life experience can be divided into two major parts: the love experience of Nuosong and Cuicui and the experience of Nuosong and his elder brother Tianbao competing for the opportunity of proposing to Cuicui.This thesis focuses on two research questions: firstly,this thesis studies distribution of six process types of transitivity system in nine selected chapters of Jeffrey C.Kinkley English version Border Town;secondly,how Nuosong is described according to the transitivity system analysis in nine selected chapters of Jeffrey C.Kinkley English version Border Town.This thesis uses qualitative analysis method to study nine selected chapters.In terms of the development of the story plot of Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English version Border Town,nine selected chapters of Jeffrey C.Kinkley English version Border Town can be divided into fourparts: Nuosong met Cuicui for the first time;Nuosong and Cuicui fell in love with each other;Nuosong and his elder brother Tianbao competed for the opportunity of proposing to Cuicui;and Nuosong misunderstood Cuicui's grandpa and left Cuicui.In each part,these selected clauses are analyzed in detail in terms of six process types of transitivity system.Results of the study show that verbal processes take up the highest percentage in six process types,and material processes and behavioral processes are ranked second and third respectively.Other processes are mental processes,relational processes and existential processes in descending order.Verbal processes indicate that Nuosong frequently communicated with other characters.Material processes describe what and how things happened to Nuosong in the love experience between Nuosong and Cuicui and the experience of Nuosong and his elder brother Tianbao competing for the opportunity of proposing to Cuicui,and develop the story.Behavioral processes disclose Nuosong's psychological thoughts to readers.Thus it can be seen that Jeffery C.Kinkley's English version Border Town describes Nuosong's life experience by Nuosong's utterances,actions and thoughts.By analysis of six process types of transitivity system,this thesis reveals that the love experience of Nuosong and Cuicui was a tragedy,and the experience of Nuosong and his elder brother Tianbao competing for the opportunity of proposing to Cuicui,by the fair way,showed both of them did not want to destroy their deep brotherhood.