Chapter Overview

• • functionalist stylistics

• • transitivity

• • checklist of formalist categories

• • ‘Indian Women’ by Shiv K. Kumar

• • functionalist analysis of ‘Indian Women’

Introduction

Linguistics took a ‘functional’ turn in the 1970s under the influence of M. A. K. Halliday's SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (SFL). Halliday viewed language as a social construct, viewed style as a function of choice, and argued that a formal feature of a text is relevant to interpretation only if it contributes to the overall meaning or ‘function’ of the text. Stylistics also took a functional turn, with stylisticians drawing analytical frameworks from Halliday's linguistic model. This chapter offers a brief outline of FUNCTIONALIST STYLISTICS, suggests a checklist of functionalist stylistic categories, presents an account of transitivity as a system encoding the representation of experience, and presents the findings of our functionalist analysis of the poem ‘Indian Women’ by the Indian poet Shiv K. Kumar.

Functionalist stylistics

Functional, or functionalist, stylistics is informed, in theory and practice, by Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. In fact, the term has traditionally ‘been used to refer to stylistics based on M. A. K. Halliday's model of linguistics’ (Lin 2016: 57). Halliday views language as constructing rather than representing meaning. The linguistic choices that writers, and speakers of course, make encode meanings and perceptions of people and events. These meanings and perceptions are encoded in the grammar of the clause.

In line with Halliday's ‘constructivist’ outlook, functionalist stylistics views texts as a site for IDEOLOGY and ideological representations of the world. All texts, through choices at the different levels of language, realise ideologies and world-views. The central constituent in the toolkit of the functionalist stylistician is choice. Lexical and grammatical choices are viewed as functional and analysed for the way they encode authorial world-views. To detect these world-views, we analyse the lexicogrammatical choices in the grammar of the clause. Halliday (1971) suggests transitivity as a grammatical system through which to analyse the textual construction of the world, as well as the construction of the events, people, and circumstances in it.

Transitivity is central to the analytical toolkit of the functionalist stylistician, providing the ‘lexicogrammatical resources’ to account for the way texts represent the experience of the world in terms of who did what (to whom) and in what circumstances (Halliday 1985).