Metafunctional Analysis Of Chinese Ancient Poem"Jiang Xue"

The literature of a nation is a mirror of its civilization and a reflection of its popular ideology at different times. With the subtlety and delicacy in language, poetry takes up an eye-catching position in literature. Classic Chinese poetry is the high artistic peak. It bears unique and extraordinary beauty in sound, form and sense. When combined with the contemporary culture, economy and politics, it says much more and says it more intensively than ordinary language does.Tang Dynasty is one of the prime stages in the development of classic Chinese poetry with a lot of well-known poets and poems. Liu Zongyuan and his poet "Jiang Xue" can be a representative of the great achievements at that age. A simple poetry describing the snow as it seems to be, it is a masterpiece which embodies the portrait of the poet himself and his insistent spirits. It was written after the poet had gone through a lot of sufferings in body and soul, revealing his willingness to be lonely and his persistence in his political ideals. To put it simply, it is short and simple in form but profound and significant in meaning.Halliday created Systemic-Functional Grammar which has been one of the most controversial but influential theories in the history of linguistics. He thinks that language has developed to meet the human need to express different meanings. The function of language can be classified into three metafunctions:the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. Briefly speaking, the function of language to represent experience is the ideational function; the function of language to interpret interaction is the interpersonal metafunction; the function of language to organize the experiential, logical and interpersonal meaning into a coherent text is the textual metafunction.The present study is based on a detailed introduction of Halliday’s theory about three metafunctions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Liu Zongyuan’s "Jiang Xue" has been chosen as the representative of the fabulous poetry in Tang Dynasty for model analysis. It will carefully research such functional features of the poems as transitivity, voice, polarity, mood, modality, thematic structure and cohesion system, revealing the writing features and the motif in a higher level. It will prove the feasibility of the application of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and enable readers understand and appreciate the beauty of this poem from a brand-new angle.