In this study, a stylistic analysis is conducted to ‘Two Friends’ short story by Guy de Maupassant in terms of M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional grammar theory. Halliday believes that grammar ...is functional because it is designed to account for how the language is used. He assumed that there are two very general purposes underlying all uses of language; to understand the environment (ideational) and to act on the others in it (interpersonal). Combined with these purposes, Halliday added a third component (textual), which is relevant to the other two. This stylistic analysis is conducted on three main levels; grammatical, phonological and lexical. At the end, one may have a clear picture of the literary work and it would be an objective way through which we can have a new interpretation of the short story. Key words: Stylistics, Systemic Functional Grammar, Guy de Maupassant, Two Friends.
Much has been written about the ecological perspectives of Buddhism and Daoism, as examples of philosophies which emphasize process, impermanence, interconnectedness, and compassion for nature. And ...the interconnectedness of the various elements of the biosphere and the Earth’s crust is the basis of ecological
. Some physicists and process philosophers have drawn attention to the inadequacies of European languages to represent the world of quantum reality, radical undifferentiated wholeness and interconnectedness, and the dynamism and uncontrollability of the material world. Notable among these were physicists David Bohm and David Peat, who looked to Blackfoot, an Algonquin language of North America, for a better representation of the natural world as interacting processes.
This article explores some of the commonalities between Buddhism/Daoism, process philosophies, modern physics and ecological theory. It then addresses the question of the affordances different languages and grammars provide for a deep ecological representation in tune with quantum physics and Buddhism/Daoism. The climax of the article starts with the work of Michael Halliday on the local grammar of William Golding’s
(Golding, William. 1961 1955.
. London: Faber), and performs a similar grammatical analysis of two passages from Golding’s later work
(Golding, William. 1956.
. London: Faber). It concludes that the Neanderthal mind style and life style in
and the world of the drowning Pincher Martin are represented in a grammatical style more appropriate for a Buddhist/Daoist/quantum physics/deep ecological worldview of human interaction with the natural world.
Abstract The paper aims to evaluate the role of language in a specific socio-political context. It offers a critical approach and evaluation of the political statements of the European Union ...representatives regarding the process of the accession of Bosnia and Hercegovina to the European Union. The focus of the linguistic investigation is on the identification of language structures that participate in the development of communicative models that enable the establishment of power relations between participating entities. The linguistic data is obtained through systemic functional grammar and evaluated using critical discourse analysis.
Fluency with formal mathematical language is necessary for students in advanced mathematics. Yet, the language has been documented as being particularly challenging for students, motivating the need ...for more empirical studies that investigate the language and undergraduate students’ understanding of it. This study makes progress on this goal for the case of multiply quantified statements. By using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, I identified meanings that students had for quantified variables, connected these meanings to the grammar of the statements, and explained how such meanings impacted the full statement. I argue for the utility of Systemic Functional Grammar when investigating formal mathematical language and students’ thinking about it.
•The functional grammar of AE and EA statements is unpacked.•Process approaches to thinking about AE and EA statements are described.•Student meanings for quantifiers are connected to the grammar of AE and EA statements.•Students may have a collective meaning of “for all x in X” and use it to interpret AE statements as EA processes.•Systemic Functional Grammar can lead to insights about formal mathematical language and students’ thinking about it.
This article is concerned with the concept of ambiguity in argumentation. Ambiguity in linguistics lies on the coexistence of two possibly interpretations of an utterance, while the role of ...contextual factors and background/encyclopedic knowledge within a specific society seems to be crucial. From a systemic point of view, Halliday has proposed three main language functions (meta-functions): a) ideational function, b) interpersonal function, c) textual function. Language could reflect speaker’s experience of his external and internal world, interpersonal relationships and organization of text, respectively. Lexico-grammatical choices under a micro-level perspective and context (the environment of language) may lead to inconsistent interpretations through semantic or syntactic ambiguities. In philosophy and argumentation logic, strategies of ambiguity have been investigated by Aristotle, since the first sophistic movement. In his Topics, Metaphysics and Rhetoric, has pointed out the notion of “
”, meaning that a term can have different senses and double interpretation. In this paper we discuss how we reconstruct the meaning of an utterance in dialogue through the mechanism of interpretation and how we analyze and construe ambiguities, combining the insights of argumentation theory and text linguistics. Research results show that in case of misunderstanding, the “best interpretation” is the less defeasible one according to contextual presumptions.
The present research describes and analyzes the Grammatical Metaphors of modality in the listening module of the TOEFL official books. The present descriptive study used a qualitative content ...analysis approach, and data were collected via documentary method. In this regard, three official TOEFL iBT books, printed and endorsed by ETS, including a total of fourteen tests were selected: The official guide to the TOEFL test (2017), and Official TOEFL iBT (Vol.1, and Vol.2). In the listening module of each test, there are six texts in the form of conversation and lecture. First, each clause of the texts was separately examined. Then, modality metaphors were compared and analyzed in terms of type and frequency. In total, 31 conversation texts and 53 lecture texts were analyzed. Finally, a total number of 264 modality grammatical metaphors were identified. The results indicated that: 1- Modality metaphors entail a higher frequency in lecture texts than the texts of conversations, 2- The frequency of explicit subjective metaphors has a higher frequency than explicit objective metaphors. Therefore, all types of modality grammatical metaphor were found in the TOEFL texts. Considering this concept and teaching it to language learners can help them have a better comprehension and production of scientific texts..
Abstract
Differences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study ...investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT) – to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The findings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they differed in their use of thematized clauses. More non-finite clauses were found in science writing, and more finite clauses in humanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These findings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary fields of study are recommended.
This research investigates the representation of older adults in Turkish newspaper reports during the first national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey in order to understand the ...representation and reinforcement of ageism in this context. To this end, fifty newspaper reports from five top-selling Turkish newspapers at the time were selected randomly and analysed using critical discourse analysis for the text producers' linguistic choices in the representations of older adults. The findings show that the older adults were represented predominantly in relation to the lockdown measures and as members of a homogeneous group. They were mainly evaluated negatively as a vulnerable, passive, and at risk group who lacked truthfulness and exhibited unusual behaviour. They were also found to be not among the intended readers of the newspaper reports. This resulted in the infantilisation of older adults and the removal of their agency. Our findings point to the linguistic choices realising these discursive practices in the Turkish context. We argue that these findings follow a trend of representation of older adults in discursive practices and that these practices are instrumental in forming ageist stereotypes and reinforcing age-related bias.
•Discursive practices of representation of older adults reinforce ageism.•Older adults are represented as vulnerable and high-risk in mass media discourse.•Discursive practices can lead to infantilization and removal of agency of older adults.
The outbreak of Covid-19 has influenced people worldwide and has led to generate a bulk of literature in the form of awareness campaigns, research reports, blogs, etc. The text and corpus produced, ...thus is of interest to the language researchers and linguists. According to Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), the corpus of a language helps to theorize the language as it provides authentic, representative, and quantitative data. The wordCovid-19since its coinage appears in the corpora as a lexeme with a particular grammatical structure. This study focuses on the lexicogrammar of the node word Covid-19in the Covid-19 corpus of 224,061,570 words available on the Sketch Engine. The design of this research focuses on the perspective of systemic functional grammar to analyze the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of the word COVID-19. We found that it occurred 423× times as a noun in the corpus of 1.51 per million tokens. The word-sketchofCovid-19includesinfect, spread, fight as syntagmatically related and the word pandemic, epidemic, disease, outbreak, caseas paradigmatically related. However, the same lexeme may enter into both relationships like COVID-19 and disease, Covid-19 and epidemic. They enter into a systemic contrast, and they also collocate. The lexico-grammatical environment of Covid-19 in the corpus shows the dichotomy of emergency and safety; chaos and health care responsibility; and pandemic and health care systems. This analysis helps in understanding how lexico-grammatical systems and structures relate to meaning-making process.
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