Abstract—The Soldier is a sonnet written in 1914 by Rupert
Brook, a British war poet. The paper aims at analyzing the
poem by applying M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL) as a theoretical framework. The study mainly
adopts a qualitative methodology to analyze the text by text
linguistics. However, the quantitative methodology is also used
to calculate the proportions of each metafunctional process in
this poem. The main findings of this paper are:
1) Topic theme: the themes of the poem are I, dust, England,
this heart, et., which show the soldie'’s love and gratefulness for
England; 2) The focus of tense: The Soldier starts with a
conditional clause and then uses present and past tense to create
a context as if he was depicting a real external world instead of
an imagination from the inner world. 3) Patterning and
re-patterning: The patterning analysis shows the soldier in the
poem emphasizes his motivation for sacrificing and spreading
the precious things in England who had brought him up. The
paper concludes that The Soldier shows a strong sense of
patriotism, which might be an approval for the former literary
studies of this poem from linguistic aspects.
Index Terms—Patterning and re-patterning, systemic
functional linguistics, text linguistics, the soldier, transitivity,
topical theme.
The author is with Shandong University, Weihai, Shandong Province,
China (e-mail: 201800630259@mail.sdu.edu.cn).
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Cite:Xintong Yu, "The Analysis of the Soldier from Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspectives," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 165-169, 2022.