Verbal Art and Systemic Functional Linguistics

This volume provides an overview of the dialectic of theory and practice through which Systemic Functional Linguistics positions itself as an appliable linguistics with reference to the theory of Verbal Art. It sketches a concise history of the linguistic study of literature tout court, as well as the roots of specifically Systemic Functional Linguistics approaches to it. It provides a detailed theoretical description of the emergence of Systemic Functional Stylistics and, in particular, of the overall architecture of Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics, the central descriptive-analytical model created by Ruqaiya Hasan. Subsequently, this book delineates and illustrates 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’, via the analysis of a poem, ’Bei Hennef’, by D.H. Lawrence. It addresses teaching of the language in literature with the tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics/Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics, 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, this volume also presents a synopsis of stylistics research wedded to multimodal/multisemiotic, corpus and translation approaches, broaching some of the many theoretical issues intrinsically entailed. With special attention to Hasan’s stylistic legacy, the book closes with a discussion of the future directions Systemic Functional Stylistic Studies might take.

Donna R. Miller is Alma Mater Professor at the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Bologna (in retirement since July 2019). Her corpus-assisted investigations have regularly explored the grammar of evaluation in institutional text types and verbal art, this last being the central focus of her recent work, in a Hasanian perspective.