A Metafunctional Analysis Of The Song Lyrics Of Scarborough Fair And Its Two Chinese Versions

Songs enjoy great popularity in people’s life for they are efficient methods to relax and inform, and song lyrics may be considered as a special spoken text written for the purpose of singing. However, the research on this field has hitherto been barely available. Especially, with the development of economy and society, the communication between China and other countries is strengthening day by day. Among them, music plays an important role. Therefore, English song lyrics translation is becoming important and challenging, and it will make great contribution to the prevalence of English songs in China and the international communication.The dissertation takes Scarborough Fair as the target of text analysis using Systemic Functional Grammar. Systemic Functional Grammar has proved to be a useful theoretical basis for discourse analysis. Based on the theory of metafunction, namely, the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function, the dissertation analyzes the main aspects of the three metafunctions. It is found that Material Process and Relational Process occupy an important position both in English song lyrics and its Chinese translations, and they play a powerful role in understanding and translating English song lyrics. In respect of the interpersonal function, Mood, Modality and Person system are mainly discussed, and the research finds that declarative mood plays a major role in English song lyrics and its translations with imperative mood and interrogative mood following behind. The analysis also shows that Modality can be realized by modal operators, mood adjuncts and comment adjuncts, and Modality system shows how the speaker expresses his or her opinions and influences on others. In this research, the first person singular pronoun Ⅰ in English song lyrics and its translations is frequently used and the third person pronoun She/her follows behind. As for the textual function, the dissertation mainly analyzes Theme choice and Cohesion devices. The purpose of the dissertation is to analyze and contrast the English song Scarborough Fair and its two Chinese versions and to provide a new perspective for English song lyrics translation, especially from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar.