A Functional Stylistics Of Fairy Tales And Short Stories

Both fairy tales and short stories are prose narratives, but they are different genres of narratives:fairy tales are mainly written for children and short stories for adults. Therefore, the two genres may show functional stylistic differences. This study makes a comparison between the functional stylistic features of fairy tales and short stories from the aspects of language complexity and ideational metafunction and gives explanation for the stylistic features of each genre.This study adopts the research methods of both quantitative and qualitative study. Firstly,10 fairy tales and 10 short stories are selected as the representatives of the two genres and all the texts are annotated manually according to the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar; then, concordance software AntConc and data processing software Excel and SPSS are adopted to get and process the data; finally, the prominent differences are explained by comparing instances of language use.It is found that, in the aspect of language complexity, fairy tales are characterized by the style of lower lexical density and higher grammatical intricacy and they are more 'colloquial', simpler and more straightforward narratives; whereas short stories are characterized by the style of higher lexical density and lower grammatical intricacy and they are more'written', more complex and more detailed narratives. In the aspect of ideational meaning, the two genres share similar stylistic features in the aspects of logico-semantic relation selection, transitivity and circumstance selection. Meanwhile they show stylistic differences in the ways of construing logical meaning and experiential meaning. It is concluded that the stylistic differences between the two genres have to do with the differences between the readers:authors make different stylistic choices to meet the needs of different readers.This study provides a fresh insight into the discussion of the constraints of stylistic choice:readers' need possibly will be another constraint of stylistic choice. Besides, it enriches the stylistic knowledge about fairy tales and short stories and demonstrates the explanatory power and applicability of functional stylistics in the study of the stylistic features of a certain genre as a whole.