Transitivity In An Old Poem Composed For The Wife Of Jiao Zhongqing In Chinese And English:A Contrastive Approach

The dissertation, on the basis of the theory of systemic functional grammar (SFG) and discourse semantics, focusing on ideation, makes a study of how people’s experience of the world is represented by transitivity in the poetic text, the long narrative poem of classical Chinese An Old Poem Composed for the Wife of Jiao Zhongqing and its English translation. It aims to answer the following two questions:(i) How do different process patterns, as construed by transitivity system, model experience in the poetic text?(ii) What are the similarities and differences in the light of transitivity system in the two versions of the poem?Transitivity system is adopted as the theory framework for the dissertation. It construes the experiential meaning in texts, that is, how people use language to represent their experience of the world, including the inner and external worlds.Transitivity system is widely employed as the theoretical basis of analyzing various kinds of literary works. However, there are few researches that apply the theory of SFG to the analysis of long narrative poems of classical Chinese. Although there are more than400papers on An Old Poem Composed for the Wife of Jiao Zhongqing, this is the first time to explore the poem through transitivity system in terms of contrastive analysis.The main findings of the present study are as follows:(i) Modeling experience in the poetic text by transitivity. Material processes help the author narrate the story and show the unequal power between the woman and man, and offspring and patriarch. Mental processes are beneficial to depicting the true love between the couple and their mental sufferings of being coerced by patriarch. Relational processes reveal the states and status of the characters. Verbal, behavioral and existential processes also contribute to realizing the experience.(ii) Distributive features of transitivity of the poem. The descending sequence of ratio of processes in the poem is:material, relational, mental, verbal, behavioral and existential process. Huang Guowen states, the narrative function is primarily realized by material process and the descriptive function by relational, mental and existential processes. The long narrative poem has the features of both narrative and descriptive writing. Consequently, it takes material, relational and mental processes as the prior choices.(iii) Distributive features of transitivity in episodes. The dissertation explores the transitivity distribution in each episode, and explains the reason why verbal processes in Episode2are eminent and why material processes in Episode4occur quite frequently.(iv) The similarities and differences in transitivity of the poem in Chinese and English. Their similarities lie in that the distribution of each process of the two versions is of great resemblance. In both languages, the arrangement of processes in accordance with the frequency of their occurrence, in the order from high to low, goes as follows:material, relational, mental, verbal, behavioral and existential processes. Their differences lie in the following aspects:(a) The process is realized by a verb in active voice or in passive voice. The occurrence of passive voice is far more frequent in the English text than in the Chinese text. This is because the passive voice, in Chinese, is often used to depict the "unpleasant or undesirable" matter, such as’‘被捕”,“被杀”,“被剥削”and“被压迫”.In contrast, there is no such a rule to follow in English. (b) With or without linking verbs in relational clauses. In English, relational processes are realized by the verbs, such as "be","have","seem","become" and "belong to". However, in Chinese, adjective or nominal groups without linking verbs can realize the relational processes. For example,"I do not have a lucky star in life" versus’‘儿已薄禄相”.(c) Relational process versus material process. The English text tends to choose relational process while the Chinese text inclines to choose material processes. Relational process involving an adjective group or a nominal group is regarded more stative, while material process, with the meaning of "doing", is more dynamic. Therefore, in a sense, English is more stative while Chinese inclines to be dynamic.(d)"Substitutive" and "reiterative". Chinese text tends to be reiterative while English text inclines to be substitutive.