An Eco-discourse Analysis On The English Versions Of Tao Yuanming’s Pastoral Poems From The Perspective Of Transitivity

At present,China is in the tide of constructing “Beautiful China” led by Xi Jinping’s thought on ecological civilization.Therefore,more and more scholars begin to look at the world from the perspective of ecology and reflect human behaviour,developing emerging disciplines such as Social Ecology,Economic Ecology,Ecotranslatology and Eco-linguistics.Eco-linguistics can reveal the ecological problem and the author’s ecological philosophy and social object through language,and Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)is problem-oriented and can be used to solve problems related to language.Based on that,this study tries to study the ecological implications contained in Tao Yuanming’s pastoral poems and their English versions from the perspective of transitivity,aiming to solve the following three questions:(1)the distributions of processes,participants and circumstantial elements in the original and English versions of Tao’s poems;(2)the realizations of processes,participants and circumstantial elements in the original and English corpora of Tao’s poems;(3)the construction of the ecological implications through the transitivity system in the three versions of Tao’s poems.Halliday(1966/1976)notes that as a semantic system,transitivity system involves the contents of the whole clause containing processes,participants and circumstantial elements.Its function is to divide what people see,hear and think in the real world into several “processes” to categorize human experiences through grammar and to point out the “participants” and “circumstances” related to various processes.This study takes the transitivity system in SFL as its theoretical framework,and the 30 representative original versions of Tao Yuanming’s poems as its Chinese corpus(hereafter,OVTPC),and the corresponding English corpora are selected from Wang Rongpei’s book The Complete Poetic Works of Tao Yuanming which is called Wang Rongpei’s Translation of Tao’s Poems Corpus(hereafter,WTTPC)and David Hinton’s The Selected Poems of Tao Ch’ien which is called David Hinton’s Translation of Tao’s Poems Corpus(DTTPC)separately.The study is based on both qualitative and quantitative research methods,and the qualitative analysis method is used here to get the statistics about thedistribution of transitivity in the corpora,and the quantitative analysis method is used to identify the realization types of transitivity system in the corpora.Finally,the study will discuss the ecological implications contained in Tao Yuanming’s poems based on the distribution and realization of transitivity system.It is found that in terms of the distribution of transitivity system,the proportion of processes,participants and circumstance elements is different in the three corpora respectively,but the proportion of participants is the highest one in all of them,which shows that though process is the core element in transitivity system,participants are more important in realizing experience and interpretation as the specific configuration of process in Tao’s poems.As for the realization of transitivity system in the three corpora,material process shows Tao enjoys the farming activities in countryside by describing Tao’s daily activities;Mental process shows Tao’s hate toward corrupt officialdom by indicating Tao’s attitudes toward rural life and official life;Relational process shows Tao’s mood of relax,comfort and carelessness by describing the attribute of the living things around him;Verbal process mainly describes the scene of reading or writing,existential process mainly describes the natural and social circumstances around him,and behavioural process mainly describes the sound of livestock,which all show the ease and leisure of rural life and Tao’s yearning for it.As for the ecological implications in Tao’s poems,it is found that Tao Yuanming’s natural ecological perspective of harmonious co-existence between human and nature is mainly expressed by personifying and humanizing the non-living actors,and his social ecological perspective of being harmonious with the people and scenery around him is reflected in description of his living environment and scenes,and his spiritual ecological perspective of being free from the vulgarity can be seen via the use of some emotional material action verbs.This thesis studies the ecological implications contained in Tao Yuanming’s poems from the perspective of transitivity in SFL and digs up Tao’s ecological wisdom.The research result not only is of social value to the ecological civilization construction of modern China but also helps readers both at home and abroad to learn the ecological idea of “the unity of heaven and man”.It also explores a feasible method of ecodiscourse analysis from the perspective of transitivity,which is of a great instructional significance to the translation of pastoral poems.