A Systemic Functional Study Of How Can I Not Miss Her And Its Five English Versions

Since its inception in the 1950 s,Systemic Functional Linguistics(henceforth,SFL)has become one of the most influential linguistic schools.SFL is not only a general linguistics,but also an appliable linguistics which pays attention to the social attribute of language,regards language as a resource of creating meaning,and emphasizes the sociality and the function of language.SFL scholars believe that form realizes meaning and that language has three metafunctions: ideational metafunction,interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction.Experiential function is a kind of ideational function,which emphasizes that language can express people's various experiences in the real world.Transitivity is an important grammatical means to realize experiential function.How Can I Not Miss Her was written by Liu Bannong,a Chinese writer and linguist,while he was studying in London.It was an important poem spread widely in China during 1920 s.The Chinese character “ta(?)” which is a person pronoun was first created in this poem,which was widely praised.The poem expresses the poet's deep love for his motherland.Researchers have studied this poem from different perspectives,but less people have studied it from the perspective of linguistics.This thesis chooses How Can I Not Miss Her and its five English versions for comparative analysis from the perspective of transitivity system in SFL,which tries to interpret poetry from different perspectives.The purpose of this thesis is to answer the following three questions:(1)how does the transitivity system construe experience in the poem and its five English versions?(2)Which target text best restores the transitivity system of the source text?(3)What are the reasons that cause the transitivity process transformation in the translation process?This thesis shows that:(1)different processes of transitivity system combine to construct the experience meaning of poetry.The mental process helps the poet express his feelings,and the material process and the existential process help to narrate the story and connect the parts together;(2)after a comprehensive analysis of the transitivityprocesses and the participants of the five target texts,Zhao Yanchun's version is the most equivalent with the original;(3)in this poem,there are three main reasons for transitivity transformation: the differences between English and Chinese languages,the differences between the translator's cognitive and decoding mode and the pursuit of literary value and rhetorical function.