Functional Text Analysis

2010 Shanghai World Expo is a great international event for people both in China and all over the world. It provides an excellent opportunity,a platform for each country to demonstrate their national economic, scientific and technological power, and to enhance their influence in this grand internatioanl event. As a language tool to promote their national pavilions, the introductions to the pavilions publicized on the official website of Shanghai Expo present wonderful texts for us to analyze their linguistic features. Studies on the texts can not only help readers further understand the theme of these pavilions--desplaying urban civilization to the full extent, disseminating advanced notions on cities and exploring new approaches to human habitat, lifestyle and working conditions in the new century, but also broaden the study scope of promotion materials against grand and solemn event.Halliday believes that it is people's demands for language that determine the functions language has to perform, and he generalized all the functions into three matafunctions: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Three matafunctions constitute three semantic potential systems of language, from which the language users make choices according to the context of situation, and are actualized by specific language structures. This is an important core concept of Systemic-Functional Grammar and also lays foundation of Halliday's functional textual analysis. Proceeding from Halliday's theory of functional textual analysis, this paper makes analyses of the three variables of context of situation and the realization of the three matafunctions at the lexi-grammar level: transtivity system, mood system, cohesion system and thematic structure on the chosen introductions to the highlights of the 15 most popular pavilions of Shanghai Expo. It is intended to study the language characteristics of this kind of promotional introductions, so as to find out how good texts help the countries to attract readers and expand their national influence.Results of the study show that in the transitivity system, the material process takes up the majority among the six processes; in mood system, the feautures are the most frequent use of declarative sentences, present tense and the third personal pronoun; in the cohesion system, the distribution of lexical methods is wider than the grammatical devices; and in the thematic structure, the frequency of unmarked Theme exceeds that of marked Theme. All these features are in accordance with the authors'desire to attract the wideset possible visitors against the backgrounds of Shanghai Expo, a grand and serious international event.