Systemic Functional Stylistic Approach To English Poetry

Content: Since Aristotle studied style as form, it has been a hot issue of much debate, mainly concerning the relationship between form and meaning, the methodologies and the factors which have an influence on style. All these are properly solved by Halliday's stylistic theories. He has put forward style as 'meaning potential' or 'motivated prominence', expounding on the nature and goals of style from the functional perspective.Style as meaning potential is based on 'functional theory of language', by which language performs three metafunctions: 'ideational' function, having the writer or speaker as an observer, which is used to express human social experience and inner psychological experience, and also express all kinds of logical relations between the entities; 'interpersonal' function, having the writer or speaker as an intruder, which aims to expressing his or her opinions, attitudes, evaluations and relative role relationships between him or her and the reader or hearer; and 'textual' function, having the writer or speaker as a text-forming organizer, which enables the other two become relevant with each other in the context. These three functions are interrelated and interlocked, forming the semantic level 'meaning potential'. It is from 'meaning potential' that the writer or speaker makes a consecutive selection to create a text according to the context of situation. On the one hand, language functions have an upward relation with the context of situation through three variables of register: field, tenor and mode: ideational is mainly determined by the field; interpersonal is determined by the tenor; and textual is mainly determined by the mode. On the other hand, the selection of language functions downward activates that of system of lexicogrammar, thus forming grammatical structure of a text; and, in turn, the selection of lexicogrammar activates that of phonological or graphological system, thus forming phonological or graphological structure. All these selections have a probability of contributing to the style of a text.Systemic functional stylisticians also consider style as 'motivated prominence'. The factors of motivation are language functions and the context of situation. Under the activation of situation, a prominent feature in the form of deflection or incongruity will be foregrounded, thus obtaining its stylistic value. Deflection and incongruity are realized in every level of a text, from phonology or graphology up to semantics; the former establishes and intensifies the form, whereas the latter violates and destroys the norm. Compared with everyday language, poetry contains very resourceful prominent features which are enumerated in detail in this dissertation.Finally, the relatively complete systemic functional analysis of Alfred Tennyson's 'The Eagle' is provided, which illustrates that systemic functional stylistics is a very operational and practical stylistic theory of analysis, presenting an objective standard for stylistic analysis of a text, and effectively making the reader's subjective comprehension based on the objective standard.