Functional Discourse Analysis of Andersen＇s ＂The Little Match-Seller

Within a framework of Halliday＇s SFL （Systemic Functional Linguistics）, this paper takes a functional approach to the analysis of the fairy tale--＂The Little Match-Seller＂ （Andersen, 1846）. The analysis is carried out in three respects： genre, register and language. Genre analysis indicates that the schematic structure of the fairy tale is very much in line with the one mentioned by Hasan. Register analysis shows that the material process is the most dominant one; the Finite in the clauses is predominantly in past tenses, and most of the Themes in the text are unmarked ones. Language analysis reveals that the lexical density in the fairy tale is relatively low. The findings in this paper can help deepen people＇s understanding of the textual features of English fairy tales.