A Systemic-Functional Analysis Of Linguistic Features Of Mao Zedong's Poetry

As a political giant in Chinese history, Mao Zedong is an accomplished poet as well. His poems are cherished as a gleaming gem in Chinese contemporary literature. They are also an inspiring part of world civilization. His poems not only inherit merits of Chinese classical poetry, but also greatly develop it in the poet's own way. Mao Zedong's poems were generated in a special historic period against a special background. Following a general survey of decades of study on Mao Zedong's poetry, we have finally found that there are lacks in the global study, theoretical study, aesthetic study, personal style and idiosyncratic study. Mass-communicative or sociological study are not enough as well as the application of theories into the practice for the aesthetic study. Furthermore, research approaches are limited to the one-model, and some western research methods available are still not applied into the poetry study. However, the study of Mao Zedong's poetry has been regarded as the study of its ideas conveyed or the political issues, which leads to the mistakes in the research, esp. the deficiency of its arts or aesthetics.However, the linguistic study of Mao Zedong's poetry has less referred from the Systemic-Functional Linguistic perspective, thus the paper is just an attempt to the field. In this paper the discussion will be primarily concentrated on analyzing the linguistic features of Mao Zedong's poetry by means of systemic-grammar to accomplish that the linguistic features of Mao's poetry are the realization of the three functions, and moreover, it is to prove that systemic functional linguistics (SFL) plays a significant and practical role in the Chinese poetry study.Besides the introduction and the conclusion the body is composed of two parts. The first part is the literature review, mainly to introduce the theoretical claims of SFL, and refers to the three functions in details. And the following part represents the application of the three functions, and in the part three linguistic features of Mao Zedong's poetry have been proposed as lively graceful figures of language, enlightening thoughts and spontaneous coherence with novel sense and theme, thus the analysis is expanded from three sections to prove how the functional theories are applied and operated.