A Study Of Aesthetic Attributes In English Documentary Commentaries From The Perspective Of Systemic-functional Grammar

In the 21 st century, the TV documentary has become the most popular program, and it has a strong impact on people’s daily life. It not only reproduces the gorgeous nature and the magical animal world, but also demonstrates the long history and splendid civilization of human society.As an important component of documentary, commentary carries the explanation to the content as well as the implication of the producer. It is filled with the power of leading the audience to think and imagine with the producer. Therefore, it is worthy of studying.From the Perspective of Systemic-Functional Grammar, this thesis tries to analyze the realization of aesthetic value in English documentary commentary by using the ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function with TV documentary Wild China(composed by CCTV and BBC) as an example. And it tries to find out how aesthetic attributes are realized by meta-functions in English documentary commentary. This thesis focuses on two questions: what’s the frequency of each type of transitivity process in English documentary commentary? What are the functions of meta-functions in the realization of aesthetic attributes?By using the qualitative-based method of study, this thesis confirms that the meta-functions have a strong connection with aesthetic attributes in EDCs. All six types of transitivity process exist in the documentary texts of each episode. The relational and material processes account for the high frequency, which realized the beauty of conciseness; the beauty of feeling and thought is realized through mood; the beauty of regularity is realized through thematic progression; and the beauty of unity is realized through cohesion.This thesis enriches the theory with which the scholars study on this type of text, overcomes the limitation of the traditional method of encoding and decoding the text, and fills the gaps of studying commentary from rhetorical and artistic approaches. More important, this thesis brings out the aesthetic value of commentary.