Verbal Art and Systemic Functional Linguistics

- Blurb -

This book provides an overview of the dialectic of theory and practice through which SFL positions itself as an appliable linguistics with reference to the theory of Verbal Art. A concise history of the linguistic study of literature tout court is sketched, as well as the roots of specifically SFL approaches to it. A detailed theoretical description is given of the emergence of systemic functional stylistics and, in particular, of the overall architecture of Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics (SSS), the central descriptive-analytical model created by Ruqaiya Hasan. Subsequently, the correspondences between Hasan' s framework and what Jakobson theorized as the empirical linguistic evidence of his ' poetic function' , grammatical parallelism and with what he calls ' pervasive parallelism' , are delineated and illustrated via the analysis of one poem by D. H. Lawrence, ' Bei Hennef' (1913). Further, the teaching of the language in literature with the tools of SFL/SSS is addressed, and a case study of the experience of guiding students towards this ' special' register awareness in an undergraduate EFL curriculum in Bologna, Italy is offered. Aiming to provide as wide-ranging a view of systemic functional stylistics studies as possible, the volume also presents a synopsis of stylistics research wedded to multimodal/multisemiotic, corpus and translation approaches, broaching certain of the many theoretical issues intrinsically entailed. With special attention to Hasan' s stylistic legacy, in closing the author speaks to the future directions systemic functional stylistic studies might take.