| Christmas is both a sacred religious holiday and a worldwide cultural and commercial phenomenon. Along with the increasing popularity of Christmas the holiday, the flood of Christmas music is attracting people all over the world. It has become an essential part and an important symbol of Christmas. However, research findings that touch upon Christmas music have been barely available. Most people don't even know that there is actually a distinction between Christmas carols and Christmas songs. A Christmas carol is a song whose lyrics are on the theme of Christmas, or the winter season in general. Christmas carols are based on Christian lyrics and relate, in the main, to the Nativity. Christmas carols can often be sung by a choir and usually have fairly rapid, regular, simple and straightforward rhythms. A typical Christmas carol consists of at least one verse and a chorus. The carol will have a distinct tune, which is usually based on musical arrangements and chords of the Medieval period. Christmas songs, often introduced through films or other entertainment medium, are specifically about Christmas, but are typically not overtly religious and therefore do not qualify as Christmas carols. Christmas songs generally have more complex compositions than Christmas carols. A Christmas song is more festive rather than religious.From the linguistic perspectives, very few researches have been done to study lyrics as a special text type, let alone lyrics of Christmas carols and Christmas songs. In view of this fact, this thesis, based on the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics, attempts to make a contrastive analysis of lyrics of traditional Christmas carols and modern Christmas songs. As there are numerous Christmas carols and Christmas songs, it is impossible to examine all of them.20 samples of great popularity have been chosen for each group as the corpus for this research. The 40 samples are investigated from three perspectives:choices of Mood and Modality, choices of process types and choices of Theme. The purpose is to find out similarities and differences in the realization patterns if the three metafunctions in texts of the two groups, pointing out striking linguistic features of each group..This thesis consists of five parts. Chapter 1 is the introductory part, including the background of the study, the significance of the research, research questions and methodology, a brief introduction of Christmas carols and Christmas songs and the layout of the whole thesis. Chapter 2 is literature review, reviewing relevant previous studies in lyrics, Christmas songs and Christmas carols, and Discourse Analysis. A brief evaluation is made at the end. Chapter 3 is the theoretical framework of this thesis, presenting an overview of Systemic Functional Grammar, its six core ideas, and the three metafunctions, based on which the specific scope of this research is defined. Chapter 4 analyzes the realization patterns of metafunctions in selected corpus and makes a comparison between the two groups. Statistics and figures have been given to demonstrate similarities and differences found from Mood analysis, Transitivity analysis and Theme analysis. Implications are drawn after each comparison. Chapter 5 sums up major findings of the thesis, points out the limitation and provides some suggestions for future research.
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