An Ecological Discourse Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Nature Poetry Froma Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective—"I Have a Bird in Spring" as an Example

With the development of the society, ecology has been become the core issues. As the inter-discipline between ecology and linguistics, ecolinguistics focus on the relationship between human and the nature, how language has effect on the nature. Emily Dickinson, a great American poet, has written about 1,700 poems that mainly focus on the joy of life,nature,life, and so on, some of which have been explored by different perspective. However, it is few to analyze them from the metafunction of systematical and functional linguistics with ecological perspective. According to M.A.K. Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics, this paper chooses a nature poem of Emily Dickinson—“I Have a Bird in Spring” to conduct an ecological analysis to show how poets express their attitude towards nature by language and illustrate a study way of ecological analysis.

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