A Transitivity-Based Analysis Of Ecological Home Consciousness In Meng Haoran’s Pastoral Landscape Poems And The English Versions

Eco-discourse analysis aims to analyze discourses from the ecological perspective to reveal the relationship between language and ecology.Transitivity system focuses on the characteristics of language itself and it can provide theoretical guidance for eco-discourse analysis.Home consciousness is a research category in eco-aesthetics,reflecting human’s thinking toward the living environment,existential state and self-awareness.Meng Haoran is a representative pastoral landscape poet and his poems contain profound ecological implications.But previous studies of his poems seldom focus on the language itself to analyze the ecological implications.This study employs the transitivity system as the theoretical framework to conduct an eco-discourse analysis of Meng Haoran’s pastoral landscape poems and the English versions to discuss the contained ecological home consciousness.It devotes to answering the following three research questions: 1)How is the transitivity system distributed in the Chinese and English versions of Meng Haoran’s pastoral landscape poems? 2)What are the functions of the transitivity system in the Chinese and English versions of Meng Haoran’s pastoral landscape poems? 3)What kind of ecological home consciousness is reflected through the transitivity system in the Chinese and English versions of Meng Haoran’s pastoral landscape poems? The Chinese corpus of this study is Meng Haoran’s fifty-five pastoral landscape poems,and the two English versions are collected from Wu Fusheng and Graham Hartill’s Selected Poems of Meng Haoran and Paul W.Kroll’s The Poetry of Meng Haoran.And this study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods for analysis.The distribution of transitivity system is presented by UAM Corpus Tool through the quantitative analysis,while the functions of transitivity system and the embodied ecological home consciousness are illustrated through the qualitative analysis.This study finds: 1)The proportions of processes,participants and circumstances in the Chinese version and the two English versions are all different.But the proportions of participants and processes are relatively high.In the processes of transitivity,the material,relational and mental processes are three major types.As for participants,inanimate participants occupy a larger portion.Besides,Wu and Hartill’s translation is closer to the Chinese version in terms of the distribution of processes and circumstances.Kroll’s translation is closer to the Chinese version in terms of the distribution of participants.2)Material processes are used to describe the activities of various creatures,reflecting the dynamic beauty and vitality.Relational processes are used to depict the natural environment and the poet’s inner environment,reflecting the unity of all things in the nature and the poet’s inner indifference to fame.Mental processes reflect the poet’s noble and unsullied spirit by portraying his affection for the reclusive life.Behavioral processes reflect the harmony of all things in the nature by presenting the physiological state of animals.Verbal processes reflect the ease of rural life by describing the poet’s conversations between friends and villagers.Existential processes reflect the beauty of the living environment by describing the natural and social environments.3)A vigorous and fresh natural home is realized in Meng Haoran’s pastoral landscape poems through the description of natural scenery,the use of material processes,and the personification of participants.An industrious social home of harmony and kindness is realized through describing various scenes of human’s real life.A serene spiritual home of simplicity and self-contentment is realized through depicting the mental and material processes of the poet.Both of the two English versions basically reflect the original ecological home consciousness,while the omission and transformation of some processes and some participants affect the transmission of the original ecological home consciousness to some extent.This study explores the ecological home consciousness in Meng Haoran’s pastoral landscape poems and the English versions from the perspective of transitivity,which has reference values for the analysis of ecological thoughts of pastoral landscape poems,and the artistic appreciation of classical poems.