Verbal Art and Systemic Functional Linguistics
di/a cura di: Miller Donna Rose
Equinox ‘Key Concepts in Systemic Functional Linguistics’
Series Editors: Gerard O’Grady, Rebekah Wegener and Tom Bartlett
This volume provides an overview of the dialectic of theory and practice through which Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) positions itself with reference to Verbal Art. It sketches a concise history of the linguistic study of literature tout court, as well as the roots of specifically SFL approaches to it, providing a detailed theoretical description of the overall architecture of Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics (SSS), the central descriptive-analytical model created by Ruqaiya Hasan. Subsequently, it delineates correspondences between Hasan’s framework and what Jakobson theorized as the empirical linguistic evidence of his ‘poetic function’, grammatical parallelism, via the analysis of a poem, ‘Bei Hennef’, by D.H. Lawrence. It then addresses teaching of the language in literature with the tools of SFL / SSS, and offers a case study of the experience of guiding students towards this ‘special’ register awareness in an undergraduate EFL curriculum in Bologna, Italy. Aiming to provide as wide-ranging a view of Systemic Functional Stylistics studies as possible, a synopsis of stylistics research wedded to multimodal / multisemiotic, corpus and translation approaches is also offered. With special attention to Hasan’s stylistic legacy, the book closes with a discussion of the future directions Systemic Functional Stylistic Studies might take.
Verbal Art and Systemic Functional Linguistics