An Experiential Metafunctional Analysis of Poetry in Song Dynasty ---- Take Ru Meng Ling as an Example

This paper is based on the experiential metafunction of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, including material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioural process and existential process. It is an aim to study the poem “Ru Meng Ling”written by Li Qingzhao and four English versions from the perspective of experiential metafunction in systemic functional linguistics. It starts with a brief introduction of experiential metafunction; then, it analyses the experiential metafunction in original poem. Next, it compares with the experiential metafunctionof these four English versions. Finally, it comes to a conclusion. At the same time, it aims to explore the feasibility of systemic functional linguistics in discourse analysis and translation by studying Chinese poetry, and try to provide a new way for the analysis of Chinese poetry translation.