Functional Stylistic Analysis Of The Two Poems Of Wordsworth And Shelley

Stylistics, as an inter-discipline between linguistics and literary criticism, has developed well in recent years and has become a more and more popular theory to be applied into the analyses of different kinds of texts. Poems, as a cultural heritage, are among those kinds of texts. Traditionally, poems are appreciated from the perspective of literary criticism. But with the development of modern linguistics, stylistics, as a more objective method than literary criticism, has gained more and more scholars'attentions. Functional Stylistics is the sub-school of stylistic theory, which takes Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics as its theoretical basis and focuses on the exploration of the style of language from the perspective of the functions of language.Since Romantic poems are of great value in the history of English Literature, two Romantic pomes are chosen as the materials to be analyzed in this thesis. One is William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and the other is Percy Shelley's On a Faded Violet. This thesis applies the Functional Stylistic theory into the practical analyses of the two poems aiming at providing a new perspective and an objective method to appreciate them. At the beginning, the notion of style, the definitions and development of stylistics as well as the development of Functional Stylistics are presented to help the readers to gain a general idea about the main theory applied. Following these parts, the theoretical foundation is presented. The foundation includes the explorations of three metafunctions, namely ideational, interpersonal and textual functions on the semantic level, register theory and three metafunctions on the lexicogrammatical level namely transitivity, mood and modality, thematic structure and cohesion. Then the theoretical foundation is applied into the practical analyses of Wordsworth's and Shelley's poems. Their poems are analyzed from the perspective of register theory and three metafunctions on the lexicogrammatical level in details. The practical analyses can be considered as qualitative analyses.From the qualitative analyses in this thesis, the findings can be summarized into the following aspects: firstly, the analysis in terms of register theory shows the main content, main characters and expressive forms of the poems. Secondly, transitivity realizes the ideational function through the choices of six processes. In the two poems, three processes are used to show that the main genres of them are declarative and descriptive. Thirdly, mood and modality realize the interpersonal function. The mood and modality are quite simple in these two poems. The subjects focus on the narrators and the flowers (the daffodils and the violet). Past and present tenses are mainly applied in the poems to show the declarative and descriptive characteristics. Moreover, only one expression in each of the two poems can be considered as modality. Fourthly, thematic structure and cohesion realize the textual function. Through the thematic structure, the two poets emphasize different information by different themes. Both of the two poems mainly use unmarked themes to show there is no important information to be highlighted. The cohesive devices on three levels, namely grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion and phonological cohesion show that quite a lot of devices are used to achieve the cohesion of the whole poem.These findings above can fully prove that Functional Stylistics is a feasible and operational theory for analyzing the poems from a new perspective instead of a traditional way. In other words, it provides an objective standard which based on linguistic element to help the readers re-read the two poems of Wordsworth's and Shelley's. It is hoped that such kind of study can show the value of Functional Stylistics,provide a new perspective for the English-learners to appreciate the poems and offer some hints for English poem-teaching.