A Functional Stylistic Approach To Original Gulliver's Travels And Its Simplified Version

Based on functional stylistics,this study is conducted to compare Gulliver's Travels and its corresponding simplified version in English in the perspectives of transitivity system and grammatical metaphor.The software UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 is employed to annotate and present the statistics of processes in transitivity system,ideational grammatical metaphor and interpersonal grammatical metaphor.The findings are presented as follows.1)Six types of process in the original novel are proportionally sequenced as material process(66.39%),relational process(15.90%),mental process(11.82%),verbal process(4.47%),existential process(0.94%),behavioral process(0.49%),while in the simplified version they are material process(55.52%),mental process(15.95%),relational process(15.34%),verbal process(10.28%),existential process(1.99%),and behavioral process(0.92%).This indicates that relational process is more prominent in the original novel,while mental process is highlighted in the simplified version.It is found that about 80% of material,mental,relational and existential processes in the original novel are cut directly,only about 20% of them are kept in the simplified version,and that newly added material,mental,relational and existential processes account for 7.73%,26.92%,19.00% and 76.92% respectively in the simplified version.It is also found that approximately 60% of verbal and behavioral processes are deleted,about 40% of them are remained in the simplified version,and that newly added verbal and behavioral processes account for 29.85% and 16.67%respectively in the simplified version.2)Proportion of ideational grammatical metaphor in the original novel(2.18%)is higher than that in the simplified version(0.92%).Most of ideational grammatical metaphors are either deleted directly or transferred into their congruent realizations in the simplified version.Among them,57.14% are deleted directly and 39.68% are transferred to their congruent realizations,with 3.17% retained in the simplifiedversion.There appear some new ideational grammatical metaphors,which account for66.67% in the simplified version.3)Few metaphors of modality are employed in both versions,but there are more in the simplified version(1.53%)than the original novel(1.00%).A large proportion of metaphors of modality in the original novel are deleted or transferred into their corresponding congruent expressions.Among them,65.52% are deleted and 31.03%are transferred to their congruent expressions,with 3.45% kept in the simplified version.A few new metaphors of modality account for 90.00% in the simplified version.Besides,no metaphor of mood is found in both versions.The above findings indicate that,to meet the needs of English learners,adapters use a variety of strategies to simplify the original novel.These strategies include:deleting processes in transitivity system;cutting ideational grammatical metaphor and metaphor of modality;transferring grammatical metaphor into its corresponding congruent expression.This study can offer the following pedagogical enlightenment:English teaching in China are supposed to adopt the original novel or the simplified versions of various levels as the tutoring materials according to teaching aim and the proficiency of English learners.