An Analysis Of A Child’s Garden Of Verses From The Perspective Of Halliday’s Three Metafunctions

A Child’s Garden of Verses is a classic book of children’s poetry, written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Encyclopedia Britannica recommends it as one of100books most worthy of reading, and it has been translated into many languages. Chinese children poet Jin Bo, who is the nomination winner of International Hans Christian Andersen Award, highly praises that "Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses is a very excellent book of children poetry and its impact on the children poetry in China is great, especially the children’s fun in the poetry." For the reasons of its popularity, many scholars have multi-faceted studies from translation, literature, aesthetics, culture and other aspects.According to Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, language is a semantic system network in nature and provides the meaning potentials through ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. These three meta-functions are widely used in the analysis of different texts, such as conversations and literary works, of which ideational function is mainly realized through transitivity, interpersonal function through mood and modality, and textual function through theme, rheme and cohesion.This thesis attempts to study A Child’s Garden of Verses from the perspective of Halliday’s three meta-functions. In order to intensify the focus of the research, the material is chosen from the four main themes of A Child’s Garden of Verses, that is, natural world, exhortation, entertainment, and fantasy, and3verses are randomly chosen from each theme. The thesis analyzes the language patterns of A Child’s Garden of Verses to interpret the deep meaning potentials and the relations between meaning potentials and children’s psychological features so as to from the linguistic point find out the reasons why A Child’s Garden of Verses attracts generations of children.The main findings can be summarized as follows:1) in ideational function, material process takes the largest proportion, followed by relational process and so on. And material process is mainly reflected in using transitive verbs, which are simple but can express rich meaning. For relational process, it presents the background information to avoid things unexpectedly appearing before children, which not only adapts to children’s cognitive ability, but is full of children’s fun.2) In interpersonal function, declarative mood is the most frequently used mood type, while the use of modality is used relatively less. Children poetry can be considered as the exchange between the poet and the readers, the large proportion of declarative mood shows that the poet is directly giving information to the readers and creating an equal status with the readers. This kind of relationship makes children quite willing to participate in the communication and read the verses.3) In textual function, unmarked theme is used the most. As for thematic progression, parallel and simple linear thematic progressions are the main types in the verses.All the above language features are consistent with children’s cognitive ability, and consistent with children’s psychological characteristics of being curious, naive and fanciful, and mimic; therefore, the verses in A Child’s Garden of Verses are loved by children all over the world.