An Ecological Discourse Analysis On Wang Wei’s Pastoral Landscape Poetry And Its English Version From The Perspective Of Transitivity

Ecological discourse analysis,as a model of ecolinguistics,aims to reveal the relationship between language and ecology through the analysis of discourse,and to show the speaker’s ecological thoughts and social goals.As an outstanding representative of ancient Chinese pastoral landscape poetry,Wang Wei mainly depicts scenes such as natural scenery and people’s activities.He injects his emotions into the scenery and rich ecological wisdom is hidden in his poems.Previous studies of his poetry seldom start from the analysis of the ecological consciousness,focusing on the language itself.Against the background that excellent traditional culture of China is supposed to be on the international stage,poetry translation plays an important role in foreigners’ deep understanding of the ecological ideas contained in Chinese poetry.Therefore,this thesis selects sixty pastoral landscape poems from the book Selected Poems of Wang Wei Translated by Xu Yuanchong as the corpus to build up two corpora,and uses transitivity as the theoretical framework to conduct an ecological analysis of the language structure and language use in Wang Wei’s pastoral landscape poetry and its English translation.Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods,it explores the systematic distribution and realization of each component in transitivity in Wang Wei’s pastoral landscape poetry and its English version,and finally analyzes the ecological thoughts in Wang Wei’s pastoral landscape poetry.The results of this research are divided into the following three points: firstly,in terms of the distribution of transitivity system,the proportions of processes,participants and circumstances in the two corpora are different.But the proportions of transitivity processes and participant components are relatively high which shows that as the two core components of the transitivity system,the mutual configuration and complement of process and participants can really achieve the role of creating meaning and constructing world experience and reality.Among them,material process and non-human participant account for a relatively high proportion,which fully demonstrates the participants’ initiative and the poet’s careful observation of all things in nature and the state of selflessness in nature.Secondly,in terms of the realization of transitive components in the two corpora,the material process realizes the dynamic beauty and vitality of nature by describing the natural activities of mountains,rivers,mermaids,birds and animals in nature;Mental process reflects the poet’s love for pastoral life and his aversion to corrupt officialdom by describing the poet’s preferences and cognition and his attitude towards officialdom and pastoral life;Relational process reflects the harmony and unity of all things by describing the attributes of different creatures in nature;Behavioral process reflects the freedom and harmony of all things in nature and the leisure and comfort of pastoral life by describing the instinctive activities of birds,beasts and humans;Verbal process reflects the poet’s attitude towards life pursuit yearning for pastoral life through question and answer;Existential process reflects the freshness of nature and the harmony of society by describing the natural environment and social environment.Thirdly,as far as the ecological thoughts contained in Wang Wei’s poems are concerned,the original poems and their English translations mainly realize the natural ecological view of the unity of nature and human beings and the equality of all things by the poet and the translator through the vitalization and personification of participants;The description of people’s real life scenes realizes the social ecology of poets and translators of being friendly,emphasizing mutual help and harmonious coexistence between people;through the use of circumstantial elements and verbs which are full of emotion to express that the poet and translator return to themselves with the belief that everything is empty and pursue the true spiritual ecology.Therefore,this research not only has an important social value for inheriting and carrying forward Chinese ecological thoughts,but also allows foreign readers to feel the harmonious ecological wisdom of the unity of nature and man,and stimulates people’s awareness of ecological protection to build a deeper ecological civilization.In addition,this study applies the transitivity system to analyze the poetry,exploring a new possible research path,which has certain significance for the further study of the ecological thoughts and English translation.