FUNCTIONALIST

STYLISTICS

Historical Perspectives
Functionalist stylistics has been regarded
as distinct form of formalist linguistics
Importance of situational context and
personality in language and society
Halliday (1971) has often been credited
with developing the key concepts of
functionalist stylistics

Functionalist Stylistics
Function in the sense of grammatical or
syntactic function
Function of language as a whole
Functional theory of language attempts to
explain linguistic structure and linguistic
phenomena

Functionalist Stylistics
Functional plurality is very clearly built into
the structure of language and forms the
basis of its semantic and syntactic
organization
Ideational
Interpersonal
textual

Functionalist Stylistics
Ideational function= expression of content
and/or representational
The speaker or writer embodies in
language his experience of phenomena of
the real world
Experience of the internal world of his own
consciousness

Functionalist Stylistics
Interpersonal function= using language as
the means of his own intrusion into the
speech
The expression of his comments,
attitudes, and evaluations
Relationship that he sets up between
himself and the listener

Functionalist Stylistics
Expressive and conative
Set of communication roles is unique
among social relations
Language is required to serve in the
establishment and maintenance of human
relationships
Interpersonal function=interactional and
personal

Functionalist Stylistics
Textual function= creation of text
Internal to language
Language makes links with itself and with
the situation
Discourse becomes possible
Text is an operational unit of language

Functionalist Stylistics
Sentence is syntactic unit
It is the text that is relevant unit for stylistic
studies
Functional-semantic concept and is not
definable by size
Internal organization of sentence with its
meaning

Functionalist Stylistics
Indeterminacy
Syntax of language is organized in such a
way that it expresses as a whole the range
of linguistic functions
The total theme-rheme structure which
contributes to the texture of the discourse

Functionalist Stylistics
Constituent
A constituent is a particular word or phrase
in a particular place; but functionally the
choice of an item may have one meaning,
its repetition another, and its location oin
structure yet another- or many others as
we have seen

Functionalist Stylistics
In the Queens remark its a poor sort of
memory that only works backwards
Poor is a modifier and thus expresses
subclass of its head-word memory
(ideational)
Queens attitude (interpersonal)
Itsthat (textual)

Functionalist Stylistics
Functional theory of language is a theory
about meanings
Not about words or constructions
Functions are differentiated semantically
meaning potential

Functionalist Stylistics
The functions are simultaneously
embodied in his planning procedures
If we attempt to separate meaning from
choice we are turning a valuable
distinction (between linguistic functions)
into an arbitrary dichotomy (between
meaningful and meaningless choices)

Functionalist Stylistics
in transitivity different processes are
distinguished according to whether they
represent actions, speech, states of mind
or states of being.
Those are identified, classified and known
as Material processes, Relational
processes, and Mental processes

Functionalist Stylistics
Material processes of transitivity are
processes of doing, usually physical and
tangible actions.
essential participants usually appear in
material process are the Actor the doer
of the process and the Goal the
person or entity affected by the process.

Functionalist Stylistics
Mental processes usually encode mental
reactions such as perception, thoughts
and feelings.
Mental processes have two participants:
the Senser the conscious being who is
involved in a Mental process and the
Phenomenon which is felt, thought, or
seen by the conscious Senser.

Functionalist Stylistics
Relational processes construe the
relationships of being and having between
two participants.
Identifying Relational (token and value)
Attributive relational (carrier and attribute)

Functionalist Stylistics
Between Material and Mental processes
lie Behavioural processes that
characterize the outer expression of inner
working and reflect physiological and
psychological behaviours
Behavioural processes usually have one
participant who is typically a conscious
one, called the Behaver.

Functionalist Stylistics
Between Mental and Relational processes
are Verbal processes, which represent the
art of saying and its synonyms.
Usually three participants are involved in
Verbal processes: the Sayer is responsible
for verbal process; the Receiver is the
person at whom the verbal process is
directed; and the Verbiage is the
nominalised statement of the verbal
process

Functionalist Stylistics
And between Relational and Material
processes are Existential processes which
prove states of being, existing, and
happening.
Existential processes typically employ the
verb be or its synonyms such as exist,
arise, occur. The only participant in this
process is Existent which follows the there
is /are sequences.

Functionalist Stylistics
Foregrounding is prominence that is
motivated (Halliday)
A feature that is brought into prominence
will be foregrounded only if it relates to the
meaning of the text as whole
Prominence as a general name for
phenomenon of linguistic highlighting

Functionalist Stylistics
Two types of prominence, departure from
a norm and attainment or establishment of
a norm
Where there is uniformity there is
regularity
In some sources, especially poets, style
may not be deviation from but
achievement of a norm (Hymes 1967)

Functionalist Stylistics
Deviation is the use of ungrammatical
forms
Prominence may be of probabilistic kind,
Bloch (1953) as frequency distributions
and transitional probabilities which differ
from thosein the language as whole.
This is what we have referred to above as
deflection

Functionalist Stylistics
Assumption that numerical data on
language may be stylistically significant
Style is a manifestation of individual, it
cannot be reduced to counting
We are not aware of frequency in
language

Functionalist Stylistics
The concern is with the linguistic options
selected by the writer and their relation to
the total meaning of the work
What cannot be expressed statistically is
foregrounding
Frequency distribution is no guarantee of
stylistic relevance

Functionalist Stylistics
Thus if style cannot be reduced to
counting, this is because it cannot be
reduced to a simple question of
prominence.
The prominence in other words is often
due to the vision

Functionalist Stylistics
Patterns of syntactic prominence may
reflect thesis or theme or other aspects of
the meaning of the work; every level is a
potential source of motivation, a kind of
semantic situational norm
Language in relation to all the various
levels of meaning that a work may have

Functionalist Stylistics
Foregrounding effect is the product of two
apparently opposed conditions of use
The foregrounded elements are certain
clause types
Patterns of transitivity
Process-participants-circumstances

Functionalist Stylistics
Semantic choice and syntactic choice
What the author chooses to stay and how
he chooses to say it
The immediate thesis and the underlying
theme come together in the syntax, the
choice of subject matter is motivated by
deeper meaning and the transitivity
patterns realize both

Functionalist Stylistics
The fact that a particular pattern
constitutes a norm is the meaning
Transitivity is the set of options whereby
the speaker encodes his experience of the
processes of the external world and of
internal world
Cornerstone of the semantic organization
of experience

Functionalist Stylistics
Relevance the notion that a linguistic
feature belongs in someway as part of the
whole
Elements of the language, the words and
phrases, and syntactic structures tend to
have multiple values

Functionalist Stylistics
Any one theme may have more than one
interpretation
A theme that is strongly foregrounded is
especially likely to be interpreted at more
than one level

References:
Weber, J. (1996). The stylistics reader: From
Roman Jakobson to the present. New
York, NY: St. Martins Press, Inc.
Nguyen, T. (2012). Transitivity Analysis of
Heroic Mother by Hoa Pham. International
Journal of English Linguistics, 2 (4), 85100.