A Comparative Study Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life And Its English Version From The Perspective Of Metaphor Of Mood

Metaphor is a common linguistic phenomenon in people’s daily life. The study of metaphor has been conducted for a long history. The earliest can be traced back to ancient Greece by the great philosopher Aristotle. As the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Halliday first adopts the aspect of grammatical level to study metaphor systematically. Through the comparative study of rhetorical shift between the level of vocabulary and grammar, Halliday explains the concept of grammatical metaphor in his book, and also distinguishes two kinds of forms of expressions: congruent expression and metaphorical expression. Congruent expression refers to the general realization of grammatical level and semantic level, and metaphorical type is the implementation of the two levels’ special choice. During his research, Halliday divides metaphor into ideational metaphor and interpersonal metaphor. At the same time he puts forward interpersonal metaphor which can be achieved by mood and modality. The so-called metaphor of mood refers to the chosen mood that does not express the meaning in the usual way as it is expressed, but expresses another kind of meaning. The meaning here refers to linguistic speech function. Practice has proved that using the theory of SFG can be regarded as a kind of effective method to study Chinese. Putting the theory on the study of modern Chinese texts has shown a good prospect.Six Chapters of a Floating Life (SCFL) is a high-level and high-impact autobiographical essay. Since the book was discovered, it has aroused widespread concern in the society. Its translation is not only loved by the domestic audience, but also popular with oversea readers. Lin Yutang’s translation of SCFL was published in 1936, and now it is the earliest edition in the only four existing English versions. There are a lot of researches about Lin Yutang’s version in translation fields, but most of these researches discuss about cultural translatability. In the framework of SFG, this study takes qualitative and quantitative research methods and collects data from SCFL’s Chinese and English texts. For data collection, the author collects all characters’ discourse dialogues from both Chinese and English texts. The study takes one sentence as a unit and takes stepping inspection methods to collect all sentences involved with metaphor of mood in Chinese and English texts. The data is used to analyze the use of metaphor of mood in these two linguistic texts. Then from the five aspects of syntactic variations, discourse markers, degrees of modality, intonations and contextual dependencies, the thesis analyzes the data, using specific examples to analyze the metaphor of mood used in characters’ dialogues and its functions in verbal communication.The study finds that there are a lot of sentences involved with metaphor of mood both in the Chinese text and the English text. Specifically it will be elaborated from the following five aspects.First,it shows a huge difference between the Chinese text and the English text in the aspect of syntactic variations. For the English text, the type of syntactic variations is much higher in the rate of use compared with the Chinese text. Second, Chinese and English texts show consistency in the context-dependent aspect. Third, from the perspective of degrees of modality, it is seldom used to realize metaphor of mood in the Chinese text; while in the English version it accounts for a large proportion. Fourth, the use of intonation shows great similarity in both texts. Fifth, discourse markers especially modal particles are the most commonly used mode in the Chinese text, but they are rarely used in the English textAll in all, the Chinese text uses discourse markers and intonations to achieve metaphor of mood and the corresponding English text uses syntactic variations and degrees of modality to realize metaphor of mood. This phenomenon is consistent with the situation that mostly Chinese is paratactic structure and English is hypotactic structure. Chinese and English texts are almost consistent in the two aspects of contextual dependencies and intonations. And it also finds the phenomenon that metaphors of mood used in Chinese and English texts are not in symmetry. Sentences which are involved with metaphor of mood in the Chinese text do not appear in the corresponding English text or are expressed in another way.This study can help people have a clearer understanding about similarities and differences between Chinese and English metaphor of mood. On this basis, people will have a better understanding of the differences between Chinese SCFL and the English version. And at the same time it is hoped that this paper will advance a much smoother exchange between these two cultures.